The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

And I understand. Anna was the first. The first child, the oldest, who put me to bed when I didn’t want to go. Who I was going to grow up to be just like. My oldest sister. Liliya would have lost the memory of her to the Forgetting, but I must have forgotten her naturally. I was maybe only two when she’s last mentioned in my book. I gaze at Mother while she eats jam from the pot, think of her terror of an empty bed. Because something inside her almost remembers, knows there’s a bed empty that shouldn’t be. That she’s missing a child. Letting out her own blood must seem less painful sometimes. And what does Mother see when she looks at me? Anson the Planter, and all the hurt that goes with him. I feel a sudden rush of grief for all of us—my mother, Anson, the sister I can’t remember.

  “We have to write the truth,” Mother says suddenly. She’s put down the jam pot, wiping my fingers with a cloth like I’m six. “Do you write down what’s true, Nadia?”

  I don’t know. I try. But who can find the truth in Canaan? Janis doesn’t tell it, the Learning Room doesn’t teach it. My father has twisted it, Mother half forgotten it, and the Forgetting is the thief that steals it. Except the Forgetting didn’t actually steal the truth from Janis, did it?

  And if she’s never forgotten, I suddenly realize, then Janis, our benevolent leader, the one who cares for us all and still carries her name, must know exactly what comes before a Forgetting. Knows, and lets it happen. How easy would it be for the Council to lock families in, to empty the streets, to write everyone down like they did for the counting, to mark each man, woman, and child? All it would take is for Janis to say it, for one Council member to understand it was needed.

  But they don’t understand what’s needed, do they? They don’t remember, and she doesn’t tell them. We’ve been complacent, trusting, assuming that keeping a book is the solution, without ever asking why the solution isn’t any better. Accepting the fact that this is the only way life has ever been just because we can’t remember any differently. But it has been different, and Janis must know it. Just like she knew how to coerce and threaten Gray.

  And now that the clouds in my brain have broken, understanding just keeps flowing, like rain pouring down the windowpanes. There has never been a reason, I realize, for anyone to be Lost. Janis knows who they are. They’re Lost because Janis has let them be Lost. Or made them be. She’s certainly allowed those unwritten babies to be taken from their mothers, boys like Gray from their fathers. And she has to know exactly who Rose is. Rose was with her on the ship, the Centauri, traveling a galaxy to build Canaan. Janis knows my mother, our names, where we live, and I’d be willing to write in my book that she knows who my father is, too.

  But why? Why any of it? If she was searching for that code, if she was trying to get Gray to find the code, then I would guess that means Janis doesn’t want anyone to know what’s in the mountain. Or to know what she wants that is inside that mountain? Otherwise she could have knocked on my front door and asked for that bracelet. Probably I would’ve given it to her. But she’s doing all this in secret, right before a Forgetting, telling Gray not to write it down. Using the knowledge she’s collected, the things no one else remembers. To shape the truth as she pleases. To bend us to her will like a piece of melting glass.

  But there’s at least one person in Canaan who will no longer be bent. Who can shape the truth for herself. Me. Write the truth, Mother said. To write the truth you have to seek it, to know it, and the only person in this city who has ever handed me the truth, in all of its reality and ugliness, I have just rejected.

  I look up at Mother, still scrubbing my fingers, scrubbing them raw, and I do something Nadia of the sunlight would never have done. I kiss her cheek. She doesn’t hate it as much as I thought she would. Then I grab a bowl and an empty jar, hurry to my room, take the blue necklace from my shelf, and hang it around my neck. The weight of this is right. Then I am out the door and up to the garden, feeling in the dark around the dead, wet breadfruit stalks until I find the jar with the plant cutting. I hold it up, looking for light in the rain. The water is thick with waving tendrils of roots.

  I walk deliberately down the stairs, soaking, set down the plant cutting, and smash the empty jar into a million pieces inside the bowl. Jemma the Clothesmaker stares at me through the pouring rain in the light of her open door. Plant in one hand, bowl of broken glass in the other, I turn down Hawking, make my way by the light of the streetlamps across Newton and down Sagan to Hubble Street. The day is dark without the moons. Clouds have consumed the stars, the wind driving water into my face brisk and chill.

  This might have been rash, I think. This is rash. I’m not sure I care. I have lived my life so frightened of pain it’s been paralyzing. I hate pain, but I hate fear more, and I’ve eaten fear every day of my life because of the Forgetting. Today I will spit it out. And what was Gray supposed to have done, anyway? He couldn’t condemn his own parents. And he told me. When he didn’t have to. When he didn’t want to. When he thought the truth would make me walk away. It almost did make me walk away. It makes me think that everything he said might be true.

  The door to Gray’s house is coming closer. I can’t see the workshop from this direction, but I can smell the furnace. They must be blowing glass. My breath picks up, a tingle of nerves dancing down my spine, different from the feel of water running down my back. I take the last step and knock on Gray’s door.

  Knowing the truth makes me alone. I wrote that once, but I think I was wrong. Fear of pain is what has made me alone. But today I realized that pain and love have a balance. I can feel so much of one only because I feel so much of the other.

  NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER

  IN THE BLANK PAGES OF

  NADIA THE PLANTER’S DAUGHTER

  BOOK 1

  Delia the Planter answers the door. She’s a head shorter than me, much rounder, with Gray’s eyes and coloring, except that her hair is soft and very straight. She’s a pleasant-looking woman whose expression is not all that pleasant when it lands on me. I’m the bad influence, I remember. And it’s only just now occurred to me that I’m going to have to speak.

  “Yes?” she says.

  “I … ” I pull myself together, hold up the bowl of broken glass. “I have some broken glass for you.”

  “Take it around to … ” She glances once over her shoulder, toward the workshop. “Never mind,” she says quickly. “I’ll take it.”

  Good. That means Gray is here. “Actually, would you mind looking at this plant for me? I don’t know what it is.” I hold up the cutting, a piece of flora I’m fairly positive Delia the Planter has never seen. Her eyes widen a little, and at that moment thunder booms, shaking the air. Water is running down my face. “Could I come in?”

  Delia hesitates, looks again at the jar in my hand, and opens the door a little wider.

  “Thanks,” I say, stepping inside before she can change her mind. I’m tracking water on her floor. “I wanted to see if it should be planted, but then no one seemed to know what it was, so … ”

  I’m so nervous I think I might be in danger of talking too much. Which would be a first. In my lifetime.

  “These are nice,” I say, stopping beside her dark day plants beneath the window. And they are. They’ve opened into pale, shining blooms now that the moons have risen, making her sitting room smell like my mountain in the dark. I try another smile. Delia does not cooperate. I go to her table, set down my bowl of broken glass, and put the plant cutting beneath the hanging lamp. She hands me a cloth before she bends down, pushes back her loose hair, peering at the purple leaves. I wonder if she wants me to dry myself, or the floor. I opt for myself.

  “Where did you say you got this?” Delia says.

  I hadn’t. “I found it growing in our garden during the sunlight,” I lie. “One of my sisters pulled it, but I saved a cutting. I think a seed blew in.”

  “No,” she says. “Not this. This will seed with fruit, I think.”

  Well done, Delia the Planter. I struggle to think of
things to ask her. “Is it ready for dirt?”

  “Hmm … ” She’s smelling it now.

  “Mum!” The door from the workshop slams. “Dad wants … ”

  I straighten, lower the drying cloth from the back of my neck. Gray is standing stock-still in the doorway to the sitting room, unshaven, sweaty, and sooty, and whatever thought had been in his head seems to be long gone now. We stare at each other.

  “I brought your mother a plant to look at,” I say. “I was afraid of doing the wrong thing. I’m not afraid of that now.”

  “Well, it definitely won’t like the inside,” Delia says, oblivious. “You’ll have to take it up to the roof.”

  “Yes,” I say. I see Gray’s eyes slide down to the necklace on my chest and back up again. “Not going up to the roof would be a mistake. That was a mistake.”

  “It was a mistake?” Gray asks.

  “Yes,” I say. And then, “Because I love … plants.”

  He blinks slow, eyes on mine. “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “I love them, too.”

  Delia stands up and puts her hands on her hips, scoots her book around to her back, out of the way. “Well, I don’t know about that, but it sure is an interesting one. Let me just go get my magnifier … ”

  Gray moves to let his mother through the doorway. She’s talking nonstop about the serration patterns of leaf edges, and as soon as her sandal hits the storeroom he’s across the sitting room floor with my head in his hands, kissing me, hard. He tastes of metal and smoke. I run my hands over his chest, around his neck. Delia’s voice edges toward the sitting room and Gray steps back, dropping onto the long bench at the table as his mother comes through the door. Her voice trails away when she sees us not where she left us. I think for a moment she forgot who I was. I drop my hand from my mouth, trying not to breathe too hard.

  “Gray,” she says slowly, “did you want something?”

  “Go ahead with what you were saying, Mum,” Gray replies, but he’s looking at me. “I love plants. I really do.” His voice is rough, a little hoarse. I wonder if it’s the smoke, or me.

  Delia snorts. “Since when?”

  “Since sunsetting,” he says to me. “When I was seven.”

  “You’re a terrible liar,” Delia comments, amused now.

  “Yes,” he agrees.

  He’s not so bad at the truth, either. It occurs to me that I’ve forgiven the glassblower’s son just like everyone else does. I guess it can’t be helped. And anyway, I think he’s just forgiven me. I want Delia to go away again.

  “Gray,” she says, looking at the roots through a magnifier, “run out back and get me one of those pots of soil.”

  “Where is it?”

  “What do you mean, ‘where’? You know exactly where.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, Mum.” I’m not sure he’s taken his eyes off me.

  “Oh, never mind. I’ll go.”

  And as soon as the door clicks I’m back in his arms. “What … is happening here, Dyer’s daughter?” he whispers between kisses. I can feel him smiling.

  “I’m telling you … I’m sorry.”

  “Accepted. Are we stealing a book?”

  “Yes.” My lips are tingling. I think they might be bruised. “I need the key.”

  I lean back to look at him. What I had taken to be soot is actually a fading purple bruise at the corner of his mouth. “What happened to—”

  We break apart at the sound of the latch. Delia comes back inside with the pot, and Nash, Gray’s father, wanders in right after. Nash the Glassblower is evidently better informed than Delia the Planter, and quicker to note the piece of glass around my neck. He smiles and casually hands me another cloth, and I think he means it for drying off until Gray, smirking, holds up his sooty hands behind his mother’s back. I try to surreptitiously wipe the soot off my face and neck while she digs around in the pot of dirt, and then I tell her she can keep the plant if she wants, which makes her happy. She offers me tea, Nash goes back to work, and I sit with Gray at the table. We have our heads together as soon as she leaves the room. Gray has one of my hands, while I run the other over the scratchiness along his jaw.

  “What’s happened to your face?” I whisper.

  “What, this?” He lifts a finger to the purple corner of his mouth. “Eshan hit me. As predicted. Took him long enough.”

  “He hit you?” Like Genivee, my emphasis is on the last word.

  “Funny thing. He didn’t seem to like being hit first. He was having a bad day. Anson the Planter had just given him all the details about what would happen if he didn’t leave you alone, and then I demonstrated, and he hit me back. End of story.”

  I don’t know how I feel about this. Anson must think he knows now. I wonder if his wife does. Delia comes in with the tea and Gray holds my hand, mother or no. She gives me the tea, but I think she’s sorry she offered.

  I stay anyway, and Gray gives me the key of glass, while I slip him a bottle of sleeping tonic that was very recently on my storeroom shelf. We go over the details of our plan to steal the First Book. I tell him about my mother, about Anna, what I’ve realized about Janis. He has to go to her before resting, and I help him decide to tell her more about my job at the Archives, that I’ve been spending time reading my old books, looking for any information or heirlooms about the history of Canaan, like she asked before the festival. Anything that might keep her satisfied. And when no one is looking he kisses me again, like he can’t help it. Like he doesn’t want to stop.

  The Forgetting is going to try to take this away from me. I know that. I thought I could protect myself from it. But I cannot. I don’t even want to. Tomorrow we steal the First Book, and then there will be twenty-four days to find a way for Gray to remember me.

  But there’s no stealing books of any sort the next waking. When I come flying up the steps of the Archives, I push down on the latch and nearly smash straight into the fernwood. The doors are locked. The Archives is closed. And so I climb the wall with Gray instead. This is a risk during the waking, and in the rain. But it’s dark, hard to see in the downpour, and when I went to tell Gray the Archives was locked and suggested going back to the white room instead, he agreed without hesitation. We’re running out of time, and I’m afraid shutting down the Archives right before a Forgetting has everything to do with Janis. And me.

  We go fast down the ladder, so wet the last meter or so is more of a slide. Gray pauses to make sure his book is covered, and I offer to put it in my pack, freshly oiled before I left. He unbuckles the strap and puts it in, and then he carries the pack, still tethered to my belt. I wonder what Genivee would have to say about that, letting Gray carry my book. Twice. She’d had plenty to say about him during those days I wasn’t talking. All her efforts gone to waste, and it was his fault, she was very sure about that.

  But when she’d seen me waiting for her after I left Gray’s the waking before, standing beneath the dripping eaves of the Learning Center, leaning against the sign that says “Learn Our Truth,” she left her friends and came bounding up to me. No flowers in her hair during the dark days, just two big bunches of yellow and blue braided cloth.

  “You’re better,” she’d said immediately. “What. Happened.”

  Well, Genivee, I talked to Janis, and I found out that she’s like me, that she doesn’t forget, and I think Mother might be going mad from remembering. I think our father knows who he is, too, by the way, and I went over the wall with Gray, and I kissed him, and he told me that everything that happened between us was a lie right before he said he loved me. Only it wasn’t a lie, not all of it, and I love him, too. Oh, and the mountain beside my pool is full of machines and we don’t even come from this planet.

  Genivee had just stared at me, eyes large, waiting for my answer in the rain. But no matter how much I might talk in my head, I knew I’d never be Nadia of the sunlight again. I bent down and hugged her, which she
accepted for about three seconds before wriggling away. Then I opened my hand, showing her a piece of glass, clear, but long and twisted, a thin spiral of never-ending swirls, a loop at one end. For hanging.

  “Gray says that when the sun comes back and you hang this in the window, it will make colors appear all over the room.”

  “What has he done to you?” she’d said, picking up the glass from my palm. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  “But I want you to write down that he made it for you, and that I gave it to you, if you would. So you won’t forget you’re an amazing little sister.”

  “And I thought I was just really good at eyeliner” had been her only comment, staring at the glass. “What happens if I hold it in front of a lamp?”

  I wish we’d brought a lamp now. The clouds and the rain are thick, blocking the glow of the moons, and any light from the glittering strands in the treetops is misted and wet. But we can’t call attention to ourselves, and we can’t linger. We’ve seen Janis out here before. We find the gorge down into the canyon and make our way around the pool in the dark, breath smoking in the chill, stopping in front of the dark cliff face.

  “You know it?” Gray asks.

  Of course I do. I’ve been saying the code to myself twice a day. I push in the numbers.

  It’s a relief to step into the cave opening, to squeeze out the end of my tunic. I don’t know why we have to be wet every time we get here. Gray shakes some water from his hair as the door closes, the lights just beyond us popping into existence.

  Inside the white room the squares glow blue and the wall says “Welcome.” I take off my shoes, hating to track mud into the pristine white space, and Gray does the same, handing me my pack while I untie my tether. He goes to the small resting room, looking for anything to dry off with. The dial on the wall says we have two and a half bells before we need to make our way back to the ladder. Gray has to see Janis; I have to make sure Mother sees me in my bed. Gray brings two blankets from the resting room, which will do. I wrap up and sit in one of the spinning chairs, bringing up my feet, chin on my knees, the chair swinging gently side to side.