Gretchen says good resting and, to my disappointment, heads back into the anteroom, toward her workspace. Imogene snatches up her things and goes, eager to get out the door. She hesitates, to see if I’m coming, but I’m still fixing my sandal. She runs out into the rain, and when I look up Deming is staring fixedly at the glowworms moving in the lamps. I take off to Room Three, before Gretchen can come back. The door is heavy, the walls to the reading rooms built thick for privacy. I get the door shut without a noise, drop the bar, and turn around.
Gray is sitting on the floor instead of at the reading table, back against the wall, his book open in his lap. He’s got that little smile on his face, just verging on a smirk. He holds out a hand, setting his book to one side. “Come here,” he says.
I come, letting him pull me down to sit where his book had been. “What did you tell Deming?” I ask him.
“That I wanted a place to be with you where my mother wouldn’t find out.”
Oh. That’s embarrassing.
“We got a lot of sympathy, actually. I think Deming has a bit of a soft spot for love. And moonshine. And anyway, have you ever seen Deming’s mother?”
I have. “How much sleeping tonic did you put in the bottle?”
“All of it. He’s big. I left enough moonshine for taste, it’s so strong, but it’s mostly tonic and water.”
When I think about our plan being completely dependent on Deming tipping up enough of a laced bottle of moonshine to knock himself out, I have that cold sensation in my chest again.
“Don’t worry yet, Dyer’s daughter. How’d you get the key in?”
“My mouth.”
He kisses it. “Good girl.”
“Here,” I whisper, swinging my pack off my shoulder. “I brought us something to eat while we wait.” I climb off his lap before I crush him, and pull out a wrapped half loaf of bread and a corked bottle of ginger water. He’s ridiculously happy about this, and I’m suddenly worried about what Imogene said. That we won’t be getting full rations. I may need to go without my share of the bread for a few days to make up for it.
While Gray is eating and talking I pull the book I got from Karl’s out of my bag, slip off a sandal and use it to start scuffing the cover. To take away the new. Gray’s book is lying open right beside us. He doesn’t seem to mind. I try not to glance at it. I wonder what he’s written to help himself after the Forgetting. If we can’t stop it. I’ve got everything I can think of written in our extra book. Just in case.
“So what did you tell Janis last resting?” I ask him, starting in on my share of the bread.
“How I’ve spent all my time romancing you, slowly gaining your trust.”
“So the truth? Clever.”
“Then I said how flattered you were that she spoke to you, and that you really did hope to do well enough to be on the Council someday.”
“Oh. Lies, then.”
“I might’ve left out forty or fifty other facts she would’ve been interested in, yes.” His brows come down. “I could lie to her better if I understood what she wanted.” We wonder about this, until Gray looks up, glances once toward the door. “I think it’s time.”
I get our things back into my pack, slide the straps over my shoulders. Gray holds out a hand, pulls me to my feet, and I approach the door. The latch turns. I listen and, very cautiously, stick my head out. The open hall outside the reading rooms is empty. Quiet. I hold up a hand for Gray to stay put, slip out the door and into the waiting room. And there is Deming. Laid out on a bench in the room’s only dark corner like he’s going to his funeral pyre. Except his chest is rising and falling. Gray’s bottle is beside him on the floor. Almost empty.
I pick up the bottle, cork it, and put it in my pack, to give Deming just a little less trouble than he’s going to get. Hopefully he’ll wake up with something similar to a hangover, the knowledge that he got into a strong bottle of moonshine, and the sense to keep quiet about taking a bribe. I motion Gray out, holding a finger to my lips. We can’t be certain Gretchen is gone. We go quick to the door behind Imogene’s table and then I open it, slowly.
I can’t hear anything, so we creep into the anteroom. Gretchen’s workspace glows with its usual light. I walk silently to the door and get an eye around the edge. The room is empty. My shoulders relax just a little, and I hurry inside, pulling out the book I’ve scuffed. Gray waits with me, tense and arms crossed while I get out the blue paint and mark the new book with the numbers of Nadia the Planter’s daughter. I’m careful to wipe down the brush, leave all on the desk as it was before, wave my book in the air to let the paint dry.
Then Gray follows me out of Gretchen’s workspace to the door to the stacks. I open it fast, and as little as possible. It barely squeaks. We slide inside, and I shut it the same way, minimizing its noise. I hear Gray let out a long breath. It’s overwhelming the first time you see it. All the lives of Canaan, compressed into one room. I thought the lights in here were brilliant until I saw the lights of the white room.
I hurry to the R shelf, Gray behind me, untie the newly painted book, and take my book from the shelf. I switch them, and tying my own book back in its rightful place is a physical relief. Gray is running a hand over the spines.
“How do you stand not looking?” he whispers. “Or have you looked?”
I shake my head. “I was tempted once. But it’s awful to think of someone looking at your book when you don’t want them to.”
“You can look at mine. If you want.” He throws that out very casually, as if it wouldn’t come as a surprise to me. “Come on,” he says. “Show me where the key is.”
I lead him to the N shelf, reach underneath, feel around until my fingers find glass. And that’s when the door to the stacks squeaks. I grab the key; Gray jerks me with him around the edge of the shelf. Footsteps click across the stone floor, a fast, efficient gait that echoes just a little. Gretchen. Gray presses me flat against the end of the shelf, just opposite the locked door. We are hidden from the other side of the room. But if Gretchen comes down an aisle, if she comes all the way to the end of any of the shelf rows, there will be nowhere to hide.
I listen to the footsteps, clicking, clicking. It sounds like she’s coming up the N aisle, the one we were just in. Gray has a hand against my mouth, as though I might speak, and I breathe against his fingers, letting the air out slow. The footsteps stop. I hear rustling. Movement. The dull thud of something heavy on the shelf. Did Gretchen just take a book? Or replace one? The footsteps move away again, the fast clip down the aisle. The door squeaks.
We don’t speak. We just hurry. Straight to the locked door. I hand Gray the key, and he goes to his knees, putting his eyes on level with the keyhole. My body is tense, straining for the sound of the other door. What is Gretchen doing here? Is she sleeping here? She must have been in one of the other reading rooms, just a few steps away that whole time. Gray puts in the key, moves it about gently, feeling to see how it fits. If he turns it too hard, if he snaps the key, then all this is for nothing and we start again. And we don’t have enough time before the Forgetting to start again. He tries a turn, very gently, stops, and adjusts it, his brows down in concentration. He does this twice more, tries a turn, and then, like a miracle, the lock clicks.
I watch a grin spread across Gray’s face. I think he’s as surprised as I am. The door swings open on silent hinges. Gray takes out the key; we step inside and let the lock click shut. Then I turn around.
We are in an old room, another huge circle, in a style I now know is from Earth’s machines. One or two hanging glowworm lamps make a dim, shadowy kind of light across a large, open space, broken by columns creating a smaller inner circle, and rising up the full height of the back wall is an enormous plaque that reads “Without Memories, They Are Nothing.” The floor is alternating blue and white squares, stone arches formed like interweaving vines fly up and out between the columns, holding up a roof that is half a sphere.
I tilt back my head, looking up i
nside that sphere, and I think there could be glass up there, in the ceiling, but the thatch has covered it over. Why would anyone build the Archives over this room? Is it forgotten, or deliberately hidden? I wonder if Rose or Jin ever saw this. The air is stale, stuffy, a little like the smell of underground, and at the back, there is a long, semicircular bookshelf, maybe half my height, curving with the shape of the outer wall, just below the plaque.
“Did they mean for it to be a meeting hall?” Gray says. “Is it where the first Council met?”
I don’t know the answer. Gray’s voice was barely a whisper, but the room has an echo. The walls seem thick, but I don’t know what Gretchen can hear. What is Gretchen doing in the stacks, anyway? Then I remember it was Gretchen’s book missing from the shelves, on my first day, and Gretchen that I heard Jonathan threaten when I was on the wall. I wonder if Janis is reading our books, and if Gretchen knows it. I start toward the bookshelves in the back of the room, and then I pause. A single book has been set on top of the shelves, a little askew, in the very center. As if it was just tossed down.
I move straight to it, like a dustmoth to a lamp. It’s unassuming for a book, medium-size, the cover faded and a little torn. It could be the one Janis was reading from, but I can’t be sure. As soon as Gray is beside me I open it.
The inside cover has two small words in the upper right corner: Erin Atan. We look at each other. That was Janis’s mother. The name isn’t written in ink, but in a soft, faded gray. I turn the page carefully, and there are numbers, equations, things I don’t understand. Just jottings, for three or four pages. Then we read:
Something is wrong with us. With everyone. Those who are willing have stopped hiding and fighting and we are living together under one roof for now, to find food, to try and find some sense. The clock in the center of the city says we are in Canaan. There are dead people in the streets. We go out in groups to drag them to the fields, where the fires burn around the bells …
“So this is after the first Forgetting,” I say. “And the clock was already there.” And it sounds like it went badly.
There is a girl here who says she thinks she is my daughter. She might be …
And I’m willing to bet this daughter she mentions is Janis. I know how Janis felt at this moment, being the only one to remember.
There has been so much violence, and we don’t know who’s done it. One group is taking the stone from a ruined building, filling in the gates, for protection …
“Gates,” Gray says. We weren’t always inside the walls.
We go on reading, about how the people chose names for themselves, trying to determine which women had given birth, dividing up the children based on looks—I know I wouldn’t have been given to my mother based on appearance—searching the city for information, supplies. Erin talks about the eerie strangeness of realizing just how much she knew about plants, particularly the ones that could be used for medicines and dyes.
I glance once over my shoulder, nervous about the door, and Gretchen walking in and out of the stacks. I flip quicker through the pages, getting an overview. Gray stops my page turning, his finger on a sentence: We are made of our memories. The whole entry describes the confusion of waking up, the marking of a family, a book tied to a wrist.
“The second Forgetting,” he says.
And after that come all the words we learn in school, the same words read twice every year at the beginning of the dark days. How the Forgetting will come, how we will write truth, and I am made of my memories. A slightly different wording than in the entry before, but the handwriting here is different, too. And it stays different, for the rest of the book. At the end of the book are lists. Name after name. Then blank pages.
I run a hand over the last page, over paper that is starting to crackle. So this is the First Book of the Forgetting. I hadn’t been positive until I read the words Janis spoke at the festival. If the first part was written by Janis’s mother, is the other handwriting by Janis herself? Did she write those things we’re supposed to recite? Gray thinks so, and it wouldn’t surprise me.
I go back to the page with I am made of my memories, where she’s describing the second Forgetting, and turn to the entry just before it.
Janis says it is coming. That we have to write down our lives, prepare. Sarah and Jorgan don’t believe her, but I think I do. Janis is gifted. She sees patterns we don’t …
Gray shakes his head. “Because she remembers. That’s why she sees. She wasn’t telling them even then.”
We have locked ourselves in, and it is sunrising. The light is so white, too bright to—
The entry stops there. The comet, I think. That too-bright sky. This also means Janis had worked out the Forgetting was coming before the second time. Members of the Canaan Project had specialized in studying the comet; Janis would have remembered that it came every twelve years. What it does prove is that Janis, at least at this point, believed the comet and the Forgetting are connected. I think I agree. What does she do to shield herself from it? What did I do?
I start turning pages, careful but quick. The next section is all the rules and regulations of Canaan. How we’re to be tested, how to write down an understanding, how to cross it out, how to write down a child’s parentage. How we restart our city every twelve years. All the things I know. And then I come to the lists.
The first is large, numbered one through one hundred and fifty. Name after name, both the first name and the trade name, but almost every one of them has been crossed out, replaced with another name written to one side. Sometimes that second name is also crossed out, also replaced with another. It’s difficult to read; the inks are all different, some of the names cramped to fit in the space.
There are five more lists after that, much shorter. More random. I stop on the third one, look up to where Gray has been motionless beside me, reading from over my shoulder. I say, “Your name is here.”
He stares at the page. There are fifteen or sixteen names besides his. “Think,” he whispers. “Do you recognize any names on this from before the last Forgetting? Anything familiar at all?”
It’s not easy, with no context. Then, “Yes,” I say slowly. I show him Gregory, Teacher. “He was our teacher in the Learning Center, the first year we went, the year before the Forgetting. I can remember having trouble saying his name … ”
Gray looks at me. “You remember me at school, from before? What was I like?”
“A mess.” I smile at him. “The man spent half his time with you, just trying to get you to sit still. He liked you, though.” Everyone always has. “He made up extra games for you to play … ” Now that I think back on it, Gray was just too quick for the rest of us. When we were half finished, he was ready to move on. I wonder what happened to Gregory the Teacher. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him since.
Gray has gone serious again. “Now tell me, do you recognize any of those names from now, other than mine?”
I don’t. Not one.
“Then I’ll tell you what I think this is,” Gray says. His voice is angry, surprising me with an echo. “A list of the Lost. The ones Janis decided would be Lost.”
I stare at the names. Why Gray? At six years old? Why any of them? Gray reaches over my shoulder and turns the page to the last list. There are only a few names on this one, but the first one is Sasha, Clothesmaker’s daughter. That is Jemma’s little girl, who is blind. At the bottom are Renata, Dyer, and Eshan, Inkmaker’s son.
I let the information sink into my mind like ink into the paper. Janis thinks she’s going to make my mother Lost. And little Sasha, and Eshan, of all people. I don’t understand. There’s no reasoning, no logic for any of it. For anything. And then I think Jonathan of the Council must know about this, that he’s been trying to warn Liliya about Mother for some time. But I will not let this happen.
I go back and look at the first list, the one of a hundred and fifty names, almost all of them crossed out. One of the crossed-out names is Erin Atan. I breathe lou
d in the shadowy silence, eyes scanning all the names, trying to categorize, to understand what they mean.
“Gray,” I say slowly, “these names that are crossed out. I think all of these people are dead.” It’s the names that are not crossed out that I know. The ones that are alive. “If the other lists are for the Lost, I think this is a list … ”
“Of the dead,” Gray says, voice bitter. “Or do you mean the people she’s going to make dead?”
That can’t be true. Except that maybe it could be. And there, near the bottom of the list, not yet crossed out, is my name.
Janis came to our class today and watched us take our tests. The teacher was nervous, I could tell because she looked sweaty when it wasn’t hot. Janis wrote down notes and picked out some of us to answer questions, and she liked it when we answered right.
I knew all the answers, and I was really glad not to be chosen.
NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER
BOOK 3, PAGE 34, 2 YEARS AFTER THE FORGETTING
My name. And there is Rose’s name, too, also not crossed out, but with a line drawn in front of it, connecting it to the name before, Zuri Adeyemi. I flip the pages back. Zuri Adeyemi appears on the first list of what I think are the people that will be Lost. “I think this is Rose,” I tell Gray, pointing at the name. He puts his hand on my shoulder.
“Let’s take the First Book to the white room,” he whispers. “See if we can compare these lists with the original names. We have to know what those lists mean. And it’s too dangerous to stay for long.”
I nod my agreement, try to think. We have to leave while Deming is asleep, but if Gretchen is still in the Archives, that’s a complication. A huge one. I wonder when she’s going to notice that her watching Council member is out cold. I wonder how long it will take for someone to realize the First Book is missing. I wonder how the two of us can fight both Janis and the Forgetting at the same time.
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