That’s not true. I can’t decide what I’m willing to risk.
I sit in Grandpapa’s chair while the house sleeps, and when the children stir and he goes out to the workshop at waking, I follow him. The streets are waking up, too. Doors slamming, shadowy figures with pitchers going for water. Irene, across the street, singing to her new baby in the lamplight. The red light is deepening. The dark is almost here. Grandpapa is checking the city’s requests for the day, getting ready to stoke up the fire of the furnace. He looks up, startled at the sight of me. I haven’t even pulled up my hood, but there’s not a supervisor due for another five-eighths of a bell.
“Do you have bad memories?” I ask abruptly. “Even though you forget?”
He throws a brick of biofuel on the glowing coals, forehead wrinkled. “Of course.”
“What do you do with them?”
“Make peace with them.”
“And that takes them away?”
“No. They never go away. Not fully. They just heal.”
But what if I’m too damaged to heal without the Forgetting? What if there’s nothing Underneath that can change who I am?
“Grandpapa … ” I lower my voice. “It’s the Changing of the Seasons. I have to go Underneath. But Jillian, Beckett … They will need a safe place. I … It’s not fair to ask … ”
Grandpapa tilts his white head toward a young man at the street corner, playing a game of toss stones. “Do you see that boy there? He’s one of my warning bells. There’s a whole network of them, all through the Outside. Word of trouble gets here faster than any supervisor, little girl. You don’t think we’d bring you Outside and never keep you safe?”
No, I suppose he wouldn’t.
“We can do the same for your friends.”
He doesn’t even ask me why they don’t need to go Underneath for the Changing of the Seasons. “How many Outsiders know who I am, Grandpapa?”
“A few. All of them trusted.”
“And that hole in your floor?”
He shakes his head. “Never you mind. But when you come back to us, things may be different, that’s all.”
He puts a hand on my head, and the breeze sneaks under the eaves of the workshop, bringing the heat of the furnace to my face. What are they up to? Smuggling food? Misappropriating goods? Whatever it is, it’s a dangerous game, and the thought of Annis, Nathan, or Grandpapa tied to the flogging post makes my stomach wrench.
“Nita told me once that she wanted to be my family’s help. That she trained to do things just the way my mother would want, trying to be chosen. Why would she want that?”
“Because of you.” He turns his blue eyes on me in a way that is very Nita. “You needed us, little girl. And we need you.”
I shake my head. I don’t understand him. “What do you do … with a memory like … loss. Like when Grandmama died?”
“You make peace with that, too. Isn’t easy. But it gets better.”
Mine can’t ever get better. Not while I’m Knowing. “But wouldn’t it be better,” I whisper, “to have no loss at all?”
“If you live in such a way that you can never lose, little girl … well, then you’ll never gain anything in the first place, and what’s the point in that? I’d have rather had Grandmama and lost her, than never have had her at all. You still have the memories. If I’d never tried, I wouldn’t have even that. Look … ”
He pulls up the undyed cloth around his ankle. The cut I stitched is a neat pink line, ten centimeters along his calf.
“And now look at this.” He raises the cloth even farther, and just below his knee I can see the end of a wide and jagged swell, a twisting scar not properly healed, disappearing up beneath his legging. “See the difference?”
I do. It is the difference between Knowing and doing. Trying and not. Like everything.
“Grandpapa,” I say, “do you have another pair of sandals?”
I don’t even turn over when I hear the door open. I stay still, arm beneath my head on the bed, facing the wall. I’ve already had an earful from Jillian, several of them. On and on. I just let her talk, because the truth is, I don’t really care what she says. Jill isn’t mad that I broke the rules and impacted a culture. If that were her problem, I could respect it. She’s mad because she thinks that when I go back to the ship, I’ll be disgraced. That there won’t be any hero’s welcome with me at her side, names in history files, everybody thinking how lucky she is. When did I get to be Jillian’s bragging rights? I never planned to do much more with my life than run around ruins, make notes, read books, and knock mud off my boots.
I hear the muffled rumble of Nathan talking from the loft above, a child’s footsteps, the clink of pottery, creak of wooden wheels in the street. Noise that is so very not Austin, Texas. I am inside the lost colony of Canaan, or what has become of it, and I can feel the long dark of space that sits between my old life and the new. I think about the caves again, that moment when I kissed Sam, like an idiot, and she kissed me back. Pulled my hair. She wanted me to kiss her. I know she did.
And then she rejected me. And then she didn’t. And I helped her do surgery, and she rejected me again. Then I waited up all night, wound up tight and listening, because I think she’s going to go Underneath and never come back out again, and she didn’t even leave when she was supposed to.
She is making me crazy.
“Beck.”
I jump like I’ve been zapped, and look over my shoulder. Samara is standing beside the bed.
“Did I wake you?”
I blink. “A little.”
“What did you mean, ‘the first one hundred and fifty’?”
I blink again. All this, and this is the thing she walks in here and asks. “What do you want, Samara?”
She sits on the edge of the bed, and I have to scoot over or get sat on. She’s struggling. I can see that. I rub a hand across my eyes and sigh.
“The first one hundred and fifty are the original colonists. Your ancestors. That’s how many of them came on the first ship, to build Canaan.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve studied the Canaan Project practically my whole life.”
She frowns a little. “You have?”
“Yes. It was a big deal to be chosen to come. They had to pass a lot of tests, and there was at least one chosen from every country, so there were a lot of different—”
“What is a country?”
And there’s a concept I’ve never considered how to explain. I’m annoyed, hurt, and I don’t know what’s happening here, but what I am learning is that I’m very bad at resisting Samara Archiva. I sit up, slide behind Samara, her hair brushing my face, and grab the blanket off the bed. I flip it out, the thick-woven cloth spreading over the floor, and squat down at the edge.
“Okay,” I say. “Pretend that this is Earth, and this”—I snag Jill’s pack, wad up her other T-shirt and drop it on the blanket—“this is a country. And here’s two more … ”
I drop her socks.
“… and another … ”
Hygiene kit.