I hit with pointed feet, and the whistling air became a gurgle and a roar. I slowed, the world going quiet, and when I opened my eyes, it was peaceful beneath the water, sun streaking down in bright beams, surface sparkling above me. Like being inside a drop of green molten glass. And I was alive.
And now I am running, skirting the edges of thick-growing groves, skimming the rims of deep clefts that open like cracks in the land, water gurgling in their depths. It’s been three days and nine and a half bells since Nita died in my bedchamber. Since I left the note for my parents, telling them I’d gone into seclusion. Since I jumped the cliffs. There’s little more than a day left to find the Cursed City, the Canaan we abandoned, before the sun sinks and the sky stains red and the dark days come.
They have a day of light left to stop me.
I look over my shoulder, without slowing my steps, at the sunbaked plain I’ve just crossed. Dust rises against the backdrop of the mountains. They’re coming. Someone Knows I’m not in seclusion, maybe everyone does, and the Council seems to have a better way out of our mountain than jumping cliffs. But they can’t come much longer. It’s dangerous to travel in the red light of sunset, foolish to attempt in the long dark, when the rains fall and the last of the wild-growing food will be gone.
I’ve been gathering what I could find as I go, fallen breadfruit and the occasional spicemelon. The Knowing can live on very little when we have to, and it’s a sick sort of irony that we of the city are overfed while the Outsiders, who need every bite of their rations, are the ones who go hungry if the harvest is bad. But fifty-six days is a long time to live on a few pieces of breadfruit.
I’ll just have to live as long as I can.
I wonder how long it took them to realize that Nita was missing. If Annis and Grandpapa know. What did the Knowing tell them when Nita didn’t come back from the Underneath?
And then I drop to my knees, as if a hand reached up and snatched me to the ground. Memory clutches at the edge of my mind, dragging. I fight, and then I fall …
… into the light of many mirrored walls, to my crumpled red dress and broken plate scattered across the floor. Nita is seizing, writhing beneath me, and it’s taking all my strength to keep the pillow pinned over her face. And suddenly, there is no struggle. I’m relieved to feel her go still, then so revolted by my own relief that I scramble away on my hands and knees, retching. The pillow falls away and Nita’s blue eyes are open, empty, staring at nothing. My stomach heaves, and the cold inside me melts, boils, burns beyond belief, and I am consumed by a single, silent scream …
My eyes snap open and I gasp. I’m on my knees in the orange shade of a pine tree, still panting from my run. But I can feel the scream inside me, and when the grief comes, it doubles me over like a blow.
I squeeze the hair on either side of my head. Breathe in. Out. Wrestle for control. Always I’ve been taught that Knowing is everything. That the truth of my memory is what makes me special, the lack of it why people like Nita are not. But I have lived Nita’s death twenty-seven times since I left the city, three during the four bells I dared to sleep, and I am tainted by it. Made dirty by what I’ve done. And I will have to live with the memory of it. Like Adam. Again. And again. For a lifetime.
I don’t think I can exist this way. Why should any of us have to exist this way?
And on top of my grief comes another sensation. Not anger or outrage. Not even fury. Those are emotions I can remember. This is something new. Simple. It is rage. I lift my head, and when I look back, the dust cloud has moved a little closer.
I wipe the dirt from the shiny new skin of my palms—quick healing is another one of my privileges—get my feet on the ground, and run, drying my cheeks with the passing air, rattling the leaves like the hot, gusting breeze.
I need a memory. A certain memory. But my mind is like the Archives of my city, a deep, forbidden place crammed with books no one wants or will ever use. I shuffle carefully through the volumes in my head, sifting and sorting while Nita’s old sandals pound the soil, staying well away from that high, dark shelf in the back of my mind. And now I Know the number of heartbeats since I left the shade of the pine tree, every centimeter of the landscape I’ve run through. I feel the soft color of my father’s lip paint, tried on when I was two. I hear the twelfth day, seventh bell recitation of surgical training. What I’m looking for is the memory of a map.
The map was inside an ancient book being conserved by my uncle Towlend—when I was young and the Archives were still being tended—a book for Council only, while Uncle Towlend was still Council. But Aunt Letitia had just died, and Uncle Towlend was falling into memories when he was supposed to be doing something else. Like working or eating. Walking. Mother said Uncle Towlend needed to cache his memories of Aunt Letitia, that they were too pleasant for him to be of any use. The Council thought so, too, eventually, and Uncle Towlend mostly stayed in his rooms after that, and there was no one to represent the Archives in their meetings at all.
So while Uncle Towlend was staring at the wall, lost in his head with his dead wife, I pushed a chair up to his workbench. And there was the book. Heavy and tattered, mysterious and beautiful. My mind turns to it now, like Uncle Towlend flipping to a page. I see the inked drawings of the valleys and the mountains, the three peaks that are to my left, the hot springs steaming on my right, watch my small finger trace the unfamiliar words. The handwriting was old, too difficult to read when I first saw it. But I can read it now. In my memory. I find the dot marked “Canaan. The Cursed City.”
I look up, fully in the present. I need to veer left, toward that pass between the mountain and the hills gathered near its feet. I turn my steps, breath coming hard. What if the map is wrong? What if there is no curse? What if I’m running toward a story just as fantastic as Earth?
And with no warning, I plunge …
… into the bridges and columns of the Forum, where huge swaths of yellow cloth are festooned between the upper balconies, lamps behind them, shooting glowing rays of fabric light from an enormous, sparkling glass sun. The false sun hangs high over our heads, lit with fire inside, filling the shadows with unexpected color. It’s the Changing of the Seasons, when the Knowing gather to eat, drink, and celebrate the rising of a sun in a sky that we cannot see. And the Forum is loud. Full of people and finery.