Matched

CHAPTER 22

A few days later, I sit in Language and Literacy, staring at the instructor as she talks about the importance of composing succinct messages when communicating via port. Then, as if to illustrate her point, one such message comes through the main port in the classroom.

"Cassia Reyes. Procedural. Infraction. An Official will arrive to escort you shortly."

Everyone turns to look at me. The room goes silent: students stop tapping on their scribes; their fingers stilled. Even the instructor allows an expression of pure surprise to cross her face; she doesn't try to keep teaching. It's been a long time since someone here committed an Infraction. Especially one announced publicly.

I stand up.

In some ways, I am ready for this. I expect it. No one can break as many rules as I have and not get caught somehow, sometime.

I gather my reader and scribe, dropping them into my bag with my tablet container. It seems very important, suddenly, to be ready for the Official. For I have no doubt which Official will come this time. The first one, the one from the greenspace near the game center, the one who told me everything would be all right and nothing would change with my Match.

Did she he to me? Or did she tell the truth, and my choices made a he of her words?

The teacher nods to me as I leave the room, and I appreciate this simple courtesy.

The hall is empty, long, the floor slick-surfaced from a recent cleaning. Yet another place where I cannot run.

I don't wait for them to come for me. I walk down the hall, setting my feet precisely on the tile, careful, careful, not to slip, not to fall, not to run while they are watching.

She is there in the greenspace next to the school. I have to walk across the paths to sit on another bench under her eye. She waits. I walk.

She does not stand to greet me. When I come close to her, I do not sit down. It's bright out here, and I squint my eyes against the white of her uniform and the metal of the bench, both dazzling, sharp, crisp in the sunlight. I wonder if she and I see things differently now that we don't just see what we hope to see.

"Hello, Cassia," she says.

"Hello."

"Your name has come up lately in several Society departments." She gestures for me to sit. "Why do you think that is?"

There could be any number of reasons, I think to myself. Where do I begin? I've hidden artifacts, read stolen poems, learned how to write. I've fallen in love with someone who's not my Match and I'm keeping that fact from my Match.

"I'm not sure," I say.

She laughs. "Oh, Cassia. You were so honest with me the last time we talked. I should have known it might not last." She points at the spot on the bench next to her. "Sit down."

I obey. The sun shines almost directly overhead, the light unflattering. Her skin looks papery and misted with sweat. Her edges seem blurred, her uniform and its insignia small, less powerful than the last time we talked. I tell myself this so that I won't panic, so that I won't give anything away, especially Ky.

"There's no need to be modest," she says. "Surely you have some idea of how well you performed on your sorting test."

Thank goodness. Is that why she's here? But what about the Infraction?

"You have the highest score of the year. Of course, everyone is fighting to get you assigned to their department for your vocation. We in the Match Department are always looking for a good sorter." She smiles at me. Like last time, she offers relief and comfort, reassurance about my place in the Society. I wonder why I hate her so much.

In a moment I know.

"Of course," she says, her tone now touched with what sounds like regret, "I had to tell the testing Officials that, unless we see a change in some of your personal relationships, we would be averse to hiring you. And I had to mention to them that you might also be unfit for other sorting-related work if these things keep up."

She doesn't look at me as she says all of this; she watches the fountain in the center of this greenspace, which I suddenly notice has run dry. Then she turns her gaze on me and I feel my heart racing, my pulse pounding clear to my fingertips.

She knows. Something, at least, if not everything.

"Cassia," she says kindly. "Teenagers are hot-blooded. Rebellious. It's part of growing up. In fact, when I checked your data, you were predicted to have some of these feelings."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Of course you do, Cassia. But it's nothing to worry about. You might have certain feelings for Ky Markham now, but by the time you are twenty-one, there is a ninety-five percent chance that it will all be over."

"Ky and I are friends. We're hiking partners."

"Don't you think this happens quite often?" the Official says, sounding amused. "Almost seventy-eight percent of teenagers who are Matched have some kind of youthful fling. And most of those occur within the year or so after the Matching. This is not unexpected."

I hate the Officials the most when they do this: when they act as if they have seen it all before, as if they have seen me before. When really they have never seen me at all. Just my data on a screen.

"Usually, all we do in these situations is smile and let things work themselves out. But the stakes are higher for you because of Ky's Aberration status. Having a fling with a member of Society in good standing is one thing. For the two of you, ifs different. If things continue, you could be declared an Aberration yourself. Ky Markham, of course, could be sent back to the Outer Provinces." My blood runs cold, but she isn't finished with me yet. She moistens her lips, which are as dry as the fountain behind her. "Do you understand?"

"I can't quit speaking to him. He's my hiking partner. We live in the same neighborhood—"

She interrupts me. "Of course you may talk with him. There are other lines you should not cross. Kissing, for example." She smiles at me. "You wouldn't want Xander to know about this, would you? You don't want to lose him, do you?"

I am angry, and my face must show it. And what she says is true. I don't want to lose Xander.

"Cassia. Do you regret your decision to be Matched? Do you wish that you had chosen to be a Single?"

"That's not it."

"Then what is it?"

"I think people should be able to choose who they Match with," I say lamely.

"Where would it end, Cassia?" she says, her voice patient. "Would you say next that people should be able to choose how many children they have, and where they want to live? Or when they want to die?"

I am silent, but not because I agree. I am thinking of Grandfather. Do not go gentle.

"What Infraction have I committed?" I ask.

"Excuse me?"

"When they called me out of school over the port, the message said I'd committed an Infraction."

The Official laughs. Her laugh sounds easy and warm, which makes a shiver of cold prickle my scalp. "Ah, that was a mistake. Another one, it seems. They seem to keep happening where you are concerned." She leans a little closer. "You haven't committed an Infraction, Cassia. Yet."

She stands up. I keep my eyes on the dry fountain, willing the water back to it. "This is your warning, Cassia. Do you understand?"

"I understand," I say to the Official. The words are not entirely a lie. I do understand her, on some level. I know why she has to keep things safe and stable and some part of me respects that. I hate that most of all.

When I finally meet her gaze, her expression is satisfied. She knows she's won. She sees in my eyes that I won't risk making things worse for Ky.

"There's a delivery for you," Bram tells me when I arrive home, his face eager. "Someone brought it by. It must be something good. I had to have my fingerprint entered in their datapod when I accepted it."

He follows me into the kitchen where a small package sits on the table. Looking at the pulpy brown paper wrapped around it, I think how much of Ky's story he could put on those pages. But he can't do that anymore. It's too dangerous.

Still, I can't help but open the paper carefully. I smooth it out neatly, taking my time. This almost drives Bram crazy. "Come on! Hurry up!" Deliveries don't happen every day.

When Bram and I finally see what's in the package we both sigh. Bram's is a sigh of disappointment and mine is a sigh of something else I can't quite define. Longing? Nostalgia?

It's the scrap of my dress from the Match Banquet. In keeping with tradition they have placed the silk between two pieces of clear glass with a small silver frame around the edge. The glass and the material both reflect the light, blinding me for a moment and reminding me of the glass mirror in my lost compact. I stare at the fabric, trying to remember the night at the Match Banquet when we were all pink and red and gold and green and violet and blue.

Bram groans. "That's all it is? A piece of your dress?"

"What did you think, Bram?" I say, and the acid in my tone surprises me. "Did you think they were going to send our artifacts back? Did you think this was going to be your watch? Because it's not. We're not getting any of it back. Not the compact. Not the watch. Not Grandfather."

Shock and hurt register on my brother's face, and before I can say anything he leaves the room. "Bram!" I call after him. "Bram—"

I hear the sound of his door closing.

I pick up the box that the framed sample came in. As I do, I realize that it is the perfect size to hold a watch. My brother dared to hope, and I mocked him for it.

I want to take this frame and walk to the middle of the greenspace. Ill stand next to that dry fountain and wait until the Official finds me. And when she does and asks me what I'm doing, I'll tell her and everyone else that I know: they are giving us pieces of a real life instead of the whole thing. And 111 tell her that I don't want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing.

They have perfected the art of giving us just enough freedom; just enough that when we are ready to snap, a little bone is offered and we roll over, belly up, comfortable and placated like a dog I saw once when we visited my grandparents in the Farmlands. They've had decades to perfect this; why am I surprised when it works on me again and again and again?

Even though I am ashamed of myself, I take the bone. I worry it between my teeth. Ky has to be safe. That's what matters.

I don't take the green tablet; I'm still stronger than they are. But not strong enough to burn the last bit of Ky's story before reading it, the piece he pressed into my hand earlier on our way back down through the forest. No more after this, I tell myself. Only this, no more.

This picture is the first one with color. A red sun, low in the sky, right on the napkin crease again so that it is part of both boys, both lives. The younger Ky has dropped the words of father and mother; they have vanished from the picture. Forgotten, or left behind, or so much a part of him that they don't have to be written anymore. He looks over at the older Ky, reaches for him.

they were too much to carry so I left them behind for a new life, in a new place but no one forgot who I was I didn't and neither did the people who watch they watched for years they watch now

The older, current Ky's hands are in handlocks in front of him, an Official on each side. He's colored his hands red, too—I don't know if he means to represent the way they look after he's been working, or if he means something else. His parents' blood still on his hands from all those years ago, even though he did not kill them.

The hands of the Officials are red, too. And I recognize one of them; he's caught her face in a few lines, a few sharp strokes.

My Official. She came for him, too.