Matched

CHAPTER 21

I have a hard time concentrating at sorting the next day. Sundays are for work; there are no leisure activities, so I won't likely see Ky until Monday. I can't talk to him about his story until then; I can't say, "I'm sorry about your parents." I said those words before, when he first came to live with the Markhams and we all welcomed him and expressed our condolences.

But it's different now that I really know what happened. Before, I knew they died, but I didn't know how. I didn't know that he saw it rain down from the sky while he watched, helpless. Burning the napkin with that part of his story on it is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Like the books out at the Restoration site, like Grandfather's poem, Ky's story, bit by bit, is turning into ash and nothing.

Except. He remembers it, and now I do, too.

A message from Norah appears on my screen, interrupting my sort. Please report to the supervisor's station. I lift my head to look across the sorting slots toward Norah, and then I stand straight up in surprise.

The Officials are back for me.

They watch me as I walk along the aisles of other workers and I think I see approval in their eyes. I feel relieved.

"Congratulations," the gray-haired Official tells me when I reach them. "You scored very well on your test."

"Thank you," I say, as I always do to the Officials. But this time I mean it.

"The next step is a real-life sort," the Official tells me. "At some point in the near future, we will come and escort you to the site of the test."

I nod. I've heard about this, too. They'll take you to sort something real—actual data, like news, or actual people, or a small subset of a school class—to see if you can apply things in the real world. If you can, you move on to the next step, which is likely your final work position.

This is happening quickly. In fact, everything seems hurried lately: the hasty removal of the artifacts from personal residences, my mother's sudden trip, and now this, more and more of us leaving school early in the year.

The Officials wait for me to respond.

"Thank you," I say.

In the afternoon my mother receives a message at work: Go home and pack. She is needed for another trip; it may be even longer than the last one. I can tell my father doesn't like this; and neither does Bram. Neither do I, as a matter of fact.

I sit on the bed and watch her as she packs. She folds her two extra sets of plainclothes. She folds her pajamas, underclothes, socks. She opens her tablet container and checks the tablets.

She's missing one, the green tablet. She glances up at me and I look away.

It makes me think that perhaps these trips are harder than they seem and I realize that in seeing the missing tablet, I haven't seen an example of her weakness but an example of her strength. What she's dealing with is difficult enough to make her take the green tablet, so it must also be difficult to keep inside, to not share with us. But she is strong and she keeps the secrets because it protects us.

"Cassia? Molly?" My father walks into the room and I stand up to leave. I move quickly over to my mother to embrace her. When I step back, our eyes meet and I smile at her. I want her to know that I know that I shouldn't have looked away earlier. I'm not ashamed of her. I know how hard it is to keep a secret. I may be a sorter like my father and my grandfather before me, but I am also my mother's daughter.

On Monday morning, Ky and I walk into the trees and find the spot where we stopped the time before. We start marking again with red flags. I wish it were so easy to begin where we left off in other ways. At first I hesitate, not wanting to disturb the peace of these woods with the horror of the Outer Provinces, but he has suffered so long alone that I can't bear to make him wait one more minute.

"Ky. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry they are gone."

He doesn't say anything but bends to tie a red cloth around a particularly thorny shrub. His hands shake a bit. I know what that brief moment of losing control means for someone like Ky and I want to comfort him. I place my hand on his back, gently, softly, just enough so that he knows I am there. As my hand meets the cloth of his shirt he spins around and I pull back when I see the pain in his eyes. His look begs me not to say any more; it is enough that I know. It may be too much.

"Who's Sisyphus?" I ask, trying to think of something to distract him. "You mentioned his name once. When the Officer told us that we were going to start coming to the Hill."

"Someone whose story has been told for a long time." Ky stands up and starts walking again. I can tell that he needs to keep moving today. "It was one of my father's favorite stories to tell. I think he wanted to be like Sisyphus, because Sisyphus was crafty and sneaky and always causing trouble for the Society and the Officials."

Ky's never talked about his father before. Ky's voice sounds flat; I can't tell from his tone how he feels about the man who died years ago, the man whose name Ky held in his hand in the picture.

"There's a story about how Sisyphus once asked an Official to show him how a weapon worked and then he turned it on the Official."

I must look shocked, but Ky seems to have anticipated my surprise. His eyes are kind as he explains. "It's an old story, from back when the Officials carried weapons. They don't use them anymore."

What he doesn't say, but what we both know, is They don't have to. The threat of Reclassification is enough to keep almost everyone in line.

Ky turns back, pushes his way ahead. I watch him move, the muscles in his back inches away from me; I follow close so that I can slip through the branches he holds back for me. The smell of the forest seems, for a moment, to be simply the smell of him. I wonder what sage smells like, the smell he said was his favorite in his old life. I hope that the smell of this forest is his favorite now. I know it is mine.

"The Society decided that they needed to give Sisyphus a punishment, a special one, because he dared to think he could be as clever as one of them, when he wasn't an Official, or even a citizen. He was nothing. An Aberration from the Outer Provinces."

"What did they do to him?"

"They gave him a job. He had to roll a rock, a huge one, to the top of a mountain."

"That doesn't sound so terrible." There's relief in my voice. If the story ends well for Sisyphus, maybe it can end well for Ky.

"It wasn't as easy as it sounds. As he was about to reach the top, the rock rolled back to the bottom and he had to start again. That happened every time. He never got the rock to the top. He went on pushing forever."

"I see," I say, realizing why our hikes on the little hill reminded Ky of Sisyphus. Day after day we did the same thing: climbed back up and came back down. "But we did make it to the top of the little hill."

"We were never allowed to stay there for long," Ky points out.

"Was he from your Province?" I stop for a moment, thinking I've heard the Officer's whistle, but it's merely a shrill birdcall from the canopy of leaves above us.

"I don't know. I don't know if he's real," Ky says. "If he ever existed."

"Then why tell his story?" I don't understand, and for a second I feel betrayed. Why did Ky tell me about this person and make me feel empathy for him when there's no proof that he ever lived at all?

Ky pauses for a moment before he answers, his eyes wide and deep like the oceans in other tales or like the sky in his own. "Even if he didn't live his story, enough of us have lived lives just like it. So it's true anyway."

I think about what Ky said while we move again, quickly, tying off areas and helping each other around and through the tangled parts of the forest. There's a smell here that I have smelled before: a smell of decay, but it doesn't seem rotten. It smells almost rich, the scent of the plants returning to the earth, of wood giving way to dust.

But the Hill could be hiding something. I remember Ky's words and pictures and I realize that no place is completely good. No place is completely bad. I've been thinking in terms of absolutes; first, I believed our Society was perfect. The night they came for our artifacts, I believed it was evil. Now I simply don't know.

Ky blurs the lines for me. He helps me see clearly, too. And I hope I do the same for him.

"Why do you throw the games?" I ask him as we pause in a small clearing.

His face tightens. "I have to."

"Every time? Don't you even let yourself think about winning?"

"I always think about winning," Ky tells me. There's fire in his eyes again, and he snaps a branch off a tree to make room for us to go through. He tosses the first branch to the side and holds another one back, waiting for me to pass, but I stay right there next to him. He looks down at me, shadows from the leaves crossing his face, and also sun. He's looking at my lips, which makes it hard to speak, even though I know what I want to say.

"Xander knows you lose on purpose."

"I know he does," Ky says. A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth, like the one I thought I saw last night. "Any other questions?"

"Just one," I say. "What color are your eyes?" I want to know what he thinks, how he sees himself— the real Ky—when he dares to look.

"Blue," he says, sounding surprised. "They've always been blue."

"Not to me."

"What do they look like to you?" he says, puzzled, amused. Not looking at my mouth anymore, looking into my eyes.

"Lots of colors," I say. "At first, I thought they were brown. Once I thought they were green, and another time gray. They are most often blue, though."

"What are they now?" he asks. He widens his eyes a little, leans closer, lets me look as long and as deep as I want.

And there's so much to see. They are blue, and black, and other colors, too, and I know some of what they've seen and what I hope they see now. Me. Cassia. What I feel, who I am.

"Well?" Ky asks.

"Everything," I tell him. "They're everything."

Neither of us moves for a moment, locked instead in each other's eyes and in the branches of this Hill we might never finish climbing. I'm the one who moves first. I step past him and push my way through some more tangled leaves, climb over a small fallen tree.

Behind me I hear Ky doing the same.

I'm falling in love. I am in love. And it's not with Xander, although I do love him. I'm sure of that, as sure as I am of the fact that what I feel for Ky is something different.

As I tie another red flag on the trees and wish for the fall of our Society and its systems, including the Matching System, so that I can be with Ky, I realize that it is a selfish wish. Even if the fall of our Society would make life better for some, it would make it worse for others. Who am I to try to change things, to get greedy and want more? If our Society changes and things are different, who am I to tell the girl who would have enjoyed the safe protected life that now she has to have choice and danger because of me?

The answer is: I'm not anyone. I'm just one of the people who happened to fall in the majority. All my life, the odds have been on my side.

"Cassia," Ky says. He snaps another branch off and bends down in a swift movement to write in the thick dirt on the forest floor. He has to push away a layer of leaves and a spider hurries away. "Look," he says, showing me another letter. K.

Thankful for the distraction, I crouch down beside him. This letter is more difficult and it takes me several tries to even come close. In spite of my practice with the other letters my hands are still not used to this; to writing in any way but tapping. When I finally get it right and look up, I see that Ky is grinning at me.

"So, I've learned K," I say, grinning back. "That's strange. I thought we were going alphabetically."

"We were," Ky tells me. "But I think K is a good letter to know."

"What's my next letter, then?" I ask with mock innocence. "Could it be Y?"

"It could," Ky agrees. He's no longer smiling but his eyes are mischievous.

The whistle sounds behind and below us. Hearing it, I wonder how I could have ever thought that the birdcall I heard earlier sounded anything like the Officer's whistle. One sounds metallic and man-made and the other is high and clear and lovely.

I sigh and brash my hand across the dirt, returning the letters to the earth. Then I reach for a rock to make a cairn. Ky does the same. Together we build the tower piece by piece.

When I put the last rock on top of the pile, Ky puts his hand over mine. I do not pull it away. I do not want anything to fall and I like the feeling of his rough warm hand on top of mine with the cool smooth surface of the rocks underneath. Then I turn my hand slowly so that my palm is up and our fingers intertwine.

"I can never be Matched," he says, looking first at our hands and then into my eyes. I'm an Aberration." He waits for my reaction.

"But you're not an Anomaly," I say, trying to make light of things, knowing immediately that it's a mistake; there's nothing light about this.

"Not yet, anyway," he says, but the humor in his voice sounds forced.

It is one thing to make a choice and it is another thing to never have the chance. I feel a sharp cold loneliness deep within me. What would it be like to be alone? To know that you could never choose anything else?

That's when I realize that the statistics the Officials give us do not matter to me. I know there are many people who are happy and I am glad for them. But this is Ky. If he is the one person who falls by the wayside while the other ninety-nine are happy and fulfilled, that is not right with me anymore. I realize that I don't care about the Officer pacing below or the other hikers among the trees or really anything else at all, and that is when I realize how dangerous this truly is.

"But if you were Matched," I say softly, "what do you think she'd be like?"

"You," he says, almost before I've finished. "You."

We do not loss. We do nothing but hold on and breathe, but still I know. I cannot go gently now. Not even for the sake of my parents, my family.

Not even for Xander.