Gray lets go of the latch, and Genivee deflates with relief. The small rush of adrenaline has left me shaky. I lean back against the bed. The edge of the knife is not very sharp, but sharp enough, the name “Kevin Atan” engraved into the metal. This must be from Earth, too. Something from Janis’s family. I’ve never seen anything like it in Canaan.
“Now we wait for Liliya,” Genivee whispers.
“Who’s Liliya?” Gray asks. I leave the knife on the bed and scoop up the bag of clothes I dropped, picking out the shirt and handing it to Gray.
“Could you just … stay turned around for a minute?” I ask him. I’ve spied a jug of water and a washing bowl, and I don’t care if it is Janis’s. I’m using it.
He sees the clothes in my hand and nods, takes his shirt and goes to stand in front of the wall of drawings. I watch him studying the shirt in his hand, rubbing the cloth between his fingers. I think he’s trying to remember it, and something about the way he stands, about the slope of his shoulders, makes me realize he’s afraid. Very afraid. And it’s making him angry. I turn to the water basin, eyes stinging.
“What is happening, Genivee? Where’s Mother?” I ask, a little more sharply than I’d meant to. I grab a clean cloth from a stack, get it wet, and start scrubbing my neck. Genivee holds her voice low, keeping one ear close to the metal door.
“Mother is with the Lost. She was bad when you didn’t come back, Nadia, and we couldn’t find the sleeping tonic. And everyone said that you and Gray had run off together over the wall and gotten yourselves killed … ”
I close my eyes, tasting the guilt.
“Then Reese came with Li and Arthur of the Metals and took Mother and Sasha. It was awful. They tried to take Eshan, too, but they couldn’t find him. And Liliya went to Jonathan of the Council … ”
I jerk off the sleeping dress and pull the clean tunic over my head.
“… and Jonathan told her where Mother was, and that you were in here with Gray, and you were sick, and he gave her the key to your room. He’s sort of … in love with Liliya, I guess. It’s creepy. And he told her when we should come to get you, and that we should get Mother, too, as soon as we can, and all of us go over the wall … ”
I put a second foot into the leggings. “I don’t believe you.” Genivee raises a brow. Just one of them, and it’s not the look of a little girl. “Liliya would go and get Mother,” I tell her, “but she would never risk breaking into the Council House to come and get me.”
“Things have changed,” Genivee says calmly. “We read the books you had hidden under the floor. And don’t look at me like that! You disappeared! And Anson the Planter came to our house, and said something wasn’t right, and he’s Council … ”
I wonder if she realizes who else Anson is.
“… and I’d seen you writing in the wrong book, a stolen book with numbers on it. So I thought about where you could hide something and looked until I found it. We know you never forgot. We know that something must have happened before the last Forgetting. That book, the old book from the Archives, we know that’s yours. We know it’s us, even though the names are a little different. Liliya understands now. And yes, she came to get you.”
Liliya knows she is my sister. She knows. And she came. I lean against the bed, let out a long breath, and when I look up Genivee is beside me.
“What happened to Gray?” she whispers. She’s looking at his back now, covered with a shirt I worry is too rough for his wounds. I’ve forgotten to tell him he can turn around. He’s scrutinizing, the way he always does, this time a drawing with trees and plants that are all wrong, and a creature I think we might have seen on the wall in the white room, with hair all over its face. This must be Earth. All of them are Earth, I think, and I imagine Janis lying here in her too-soft bed, just looking. I wonder who drew them.
Suddenly, Gray turns to the table beside him, covered in little boxes and bowls of flower petals, and sweeps all of it to the floor, throwing down the table, too, for good measure. Genivee jumps, but she stays where she is. Gray just crosses his arms. He’s breathing hard, and that probably hurts.
“We can’t let them have him,” I whisper to my sister. “No matter what.”
“Okay,” she says. And the tremor in her voice tells me that no matter how smart and capable, my sister really is just twelve, and understanding things I wish I could protect her from. Janis could use Genivee just as easily as Gray, I realize. If she found us here. We have to get out. Maybe we could wait out the Forgetting in the white room, like Gray had suggested, now that I know the spores can only live three days. Or will Janis be sitting on a rock with Reese and Li, or whoever else she recruits, the first time we open the door? She’ll guess where I’ve gone, and she won’t let that door close a second time.
Then I spot something in the mess Gray has made of Janis’s table. I go and pick it up. It’s a small bottle, a tiny amount of clear liquid left in the bottom. And there’s a tube with a needle in the clutter, too. I feel relieved then. Certain. This had held the cure, and of course Janis was using it on herself, when she was sick. I show it to Gray.
“This had something inside that I think can help you remember again. I’m going to get it for you, okay?”
He looks at the little bottle, then so intently at my face. Trying to wring the memory from his mind. Then we all jump, but it’s only Liliya, coming in the door. My sister and I exchange a look. There are many things we could say, and we both decide not to.
“Reese has gone,” she whispers. “I think to the clock to find Janis. We can get out right now.”
“Who else is in the house?” I ask.
“No one. Soon it will be the whole Council, though. They’ll gather with Janis in the amphitheater, then come here for the Forgetting. Where are your books?”
“Gone,” I say simply. “What time is it?”
“Four and a half hours.” Until the Forgetting.
“Liliya, you and Genivee take Gray and get Mother out of the houses of the Lost and go … ”
Where? Where are we going to go? And then I look at the bottle in my hand, and I realize something. Those spores make Janis sick. She must have somewhere that’s like the white room, sealed, where the air can’t get in, where she can hide from the Forgetting … And then I smile. I know why the Archives was built over that room, and I know why it smelled so stale.
“Go to the Archives. There’s something here, in the underground room, that I need to get.”
“You mean Janis’s laboratory? Don’t go down there, Nadia.”
“I’ve spent quite a lot of time down there, actually.” I turn to Gray, standing beside me like we’re tethered. “When you get there, go inside and keep going back, as far as you can. Past the shelves there will be one more door. Use the key you have around your neck. Really gently, though. It might break. I’ll meet you there.”
Gray looks at me, at the empty bottle I still have in my hand. “No,” he says. “I’m with you.” He yanks the string over his head, holds out the glass key toward Liliya, moves his eyes deliberately to the bottle in my hand, and back to my face.
“I don’t want them to find you again,” I whisper. “I want you to get out.”
“I’m with you,” he says again. “Take it or leave it.”
This almost makes me smile. “Okay,” I say, thinking. I look at my sisters. “He’s right. Bring Mother back here. There’s a better way to get there, anyway.”
Liliya almost looks like she wants to argue, except that I don’t think there’s any argument in her right now. She nods. It really is too bad she’s going to forget this. Unless she doesn’t.
Liliya and Genivee turn for the door while I grab the long knife from the bed. When my sisters are out and down the hall, Gray grabs my arm.
“Tell me. Am I about to forget again?”
I look at his face, at the rage and frustration simmering below the surface. “The day you forgot,” I said, “we planned what we’d do. Right now I’m going t
o try and hide you from the Forgetting, and I’m going to get more of those bottles and put something into your skin that will make you remember. But … if it doesn’t work, then I’ll remember for us. Like I said I would.”
Gray looks away from me. Jaw clenched. “That’s not good enough.”
“I know,” I whisper.
“But you swear you’ll try to help me remember.”
He’s breathing hard as I nod, only just under control. I want him to trust me again. Choose me again. But as we slip out of Janis’s room and through the empty hallways of the Council House, I’m not at all sure that’s what will happen.
I used to think that when the Forgetting came, my mother and sisters would need me. To remember. To keep us together. Then I knew that Gray would need me to remember, too. To keep us together.
Now I’m beginning to think it’s all of Canaan that needs someone to remember. To keep our city from falling apart …
NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER
IN THE BLANK PAGES OF
NADIA THE PLANTER’S DAUGHTER
BOOK 1
Liliya points my way to the stairwell that goes to the laboratory, uncomfortably familiar with the layout of the Council House. Gray follows me down. It’s dim and dank in the laboratory, as Liliya called it, with that slightly foul odor burning in my nose. The broken glass has been swept away, but Janis’s book is still on the desk, crammed with notes, the knife she used to slit Gray’s shirt beside it. I see the cure on the shelf, eight bottles of Remembering, just above where the bottle of Forgetting had sat. The one that I threw. It looked like Janis gave herself an entire bottle from the empty one in her room, which is also the amount I’m guessing she put in me. So that’s eight people I can make remember, maybe nine if there’s another person as small as Genivee. I start counting in my head: Gray, Mother, Liliya, Genivee, Gray’s parents. Rose, and maybe one more. I don’t know how I could ever choose just one more.
“I need the needles,” I say to Gray. “They’ll look like a tube with something sharp on the end.”
He goes to the other side of the high table and starts looking before I even finish the sentence. I want to stick a needle in his arm right now, but the spores need to get into the air and die first. Janis has proved that a person can be reinfected. There are no more bottles on the shelf, so I start opening the drawers on my side of the cabinet beneath the table, searching for more. A scrap of cloth catches my eye from underneath the cabinet. I touch it, then pull it out. It’s my pack.
I can’t believe it. I open the flap, and there is my book, the First Book, even the empty bottle from drugging Deming. In all the confusion of my tossing the Forgetting, whatever she’d had to do to drag us both upstairs, and then being sick, it seems that Janis has overlooked this. Or just hasn’t found it. I doubt she’ll have been as careless about Gray’s book.
A voice from the stairway shocks me into stillness. “Well, look who’s awake.”
I whirl around. It’s Reese, coming down the last two stairs. My heartbeat stutters into new life, racing. He has his eyes only on me, which means Gray must have been down, searching low and out of Reese’s sight line. He needs to stay that way.
“I’m just going to take what I need and go,” I say calmly. “None of this has anything to do with you.”
“Oh, now she speaks. Now that she’s afraid of me.”
I make a move toward the door, getting his back to Gray, but he jerks me hard by my knot of tangled hair.
“It’s four hours before the Forgetting,” he says, walking me backward, steering me by the hair. “And you owe me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t tell her what you had in that bag, did I? She doesn’t even know her book is missing.”
“Let me go,” I say. “Whatever she’s promised to give you, she won’t do it. You should just let me—”
He laughs. “Little girl, we’re all about to forget. And right now, I don’t care about promises, and I am not thinking about Janis.”
He searches me with one hand, my hair held in the other, like we’re at the Archives, like before he tied me to the post. Except it’s nothing like that. And there’s nothing but Reese and air within my reach. The long knife sits on the high table where I left it, the smaller one on Janis’s desk. I try to push him away, to scratch his face, but I’m weak from sickness and he’s built like a fern trunk. He slaps me, my head held almost immobile by the hair, and I feel strands rip from my scalp, see a burst of stars. Taste blood.
“Be still,” he says. “You’re not going to remember. No one has to—”
A thud stops his words, a dull noise, the sound of metal hitting something both soft and solid. The grip in my hair loosens, and Reese staggers, turns, and then Gray hits him again, this time in the side of the head. Gray has a small pot in his hand, metal and heavy-bottomed. Reese steps back, loses his balance, goes careening into the shelves, and when he falls, they fall with him, glass smashing, papers fluttering, smaller things rolling across the floor. For one moment, everything is still.
Then Gray throws down the pot with a clang that makes me wince. He’s panting hard, otherwise immobile, and I know what that means. He is boiling, on fire with rage. “Are you all right?”
I don’t think I am. But not because of a split lip, or the panic I haven’t yet recovered from. I’m not all right because of the noise of all those breaking bottles.
“Help me get it off him,” I say, and when we push the shelf back upright, balance it against the wall, Reese lies motionless in a scatter of detritus and broken glass, his chest still rising and falling. A sharp smell wafts up as I search frantically through the mess, something I’ve smelled before but can’t place. In the end I hold up a one single, unbroken bottle of Remembering. And I know who it’s for.
“This is yours,” I tell him. “We have to wait until everything is out of the air, but after that, it’s for you. Okay?”
Gray watches me getting up, hurrying my bare feet over the glass-strewn floor, tucking the bottle into my pack. He hasn’t moved. I’m sure he’s in pain.
“Will it give me my memories back?”
“I think it will.”
“Good. Because if I’m going to try and kill the next man that touches you, it might be good to know a thing or two about you first.”
I actually smile, just a little. “Come on,” I say, sliding the straps of my pack over my shoulders. “We’ll meet them upstairs and go the other way.” In this room, with an injured Reese, is the last place Janis or Jonathan needs to find Gray.
He follows me up the stairs, and I am running now, not nearly as fast as I used to, but so much stronger than when I woke. We pass through the empty house, large rooms and corridors filled with more furniture than I’ve ever seen, and I wish I had Liliya to guide me. It takes several minutes to find the front door, and when I do, my sisters haven’t come yet with Mother. The sky is streaked with pink, the air soft. I don’t want to wait in full view of the road into the city, either.
I look back at the house, undecided, and that’s when I stare out across the sunrising fields and see the thin trail of smoke rising from the houses of the Lost. The houses with the holes patched, and the strong new doors.
Oh, I don’t think we’ll have be having any Lost after this Forgetting. We have a food shortage, or haven’t you heard?
“She’s burning them,” I say. “She’s burning them!”
And I run into the fields, between the damp rows of the newly planted grain, all the way to the fences that surround the houses of the Lost. My knees are buckling when I get there, Gray coming just behind me. The new gates are open, not barred, and in one, quick glance I take in the biofuel stacked along the plaster walls, the thatch already flaming in one place, and Jonathan of the Council setting fire to the piles of fuel with a torch. Liliya chases after him, and Genivee kneels on the ground beside Jemma the Clothesmaker, who seems to be unconscious.
Smoke must be making its way inside fr
om the burning section of thatch. I can hear the muffled screams through the walls. Mother is in there. Rose. And Sasha, Jemma’s little girl. I wonder if Jonathan has hit Jemma. Gray takes the long knife from my pack and goes straight to the heavy new door while I hurry to Jonathan. The smooth facade he wears is gone.
“I have to!” he’s yelling. “You don’t understand. I have to … ”
“No, you don’t,” Liliya says.
“Yes, I do!” He puts the torch to the next stack of fuel, and I see what my sister is trying to do. Jonathan has a key around his neck. Gray is beating at the latch with the handle of the knife, hollow, clanging thuds amid the noise of fire.
“Jonathan, you don’t have to do what she says!” Liliya is moving closer to him. “Just stop doing what she says!”
“Don’t!” He brandishes the torch at her, slowing her steps. “If I don’t, it will be you! She’ll make me do it to you!”
Liliya stops.
“ ‘Do it or the child will!’ ” Jonathan yells. “ ‘Look like you enjoy it, or it will be Liliya next time.’ ” His voice is almost singsong, reciting what he’s heard. “ ‘You wouldn’t want that to happen to Liliya, now would you?’ And she’ll make it happen. She always makes it happen! And she’ll make me remember … ”
“Jonathan,” I say, startling him into looking at me. I don’t think he knew I was here. The screams from the houses of the Lost are getting more frantic. “I have the cure. Liliya is going to remember this. She’ll remember what you did here today.”
Liliya has no idea what I’m talking about, but her gaze snaps back to Jonathan. Now he’s the one who looks stricken.
“She swore to me,” Jonathan says. “She swore this would be the last. That today I can forget. That I never have to remember again.” He looks at Liliya and his voice breaks. “If I do it, your name is on the list.”
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