The Knowing

by Sharon Cameron

  I almost smile, because the answer is so easy. “Yes.”

  She closes her eyes, breathes a long sigh, and it doesn’t take much to lean in and kiss her, once, just a little. She doesn’t move, doesn’t open her eyes. I touch her lips again, and she melts like ice in my mouth. The hand on my face slides back into my hair, and now I taste that fresh smell, lemon and sweet and a little salt from tears. I feel the skin of her neck beneath my fingers, a gasp of a surprise soft against my mouth. She kisses me back, almost wild, on her knees, holding me on both sides by the hair. And then the world beneath the blanket breaks open, the cold rushing in, and she is gone, standing, fingers on her mouth. Backing away from me.

  “You cannot give me this memory,” she says.

  I look at her, confused, like I’ve fallen into cold water in my sleep. But she doesn’t say another word. She turns and walks away through the red light.

  As soon as I leave the shelter of the rocks, I run—past the eddying pool where Jill nearly drowned, where the boat is stuck, toward the waterfall that spit us out into this cavern. There’s a rockfall there, tumbling down an incline, a smooth, carved path upward that I realize must be leading to the cartage way. I sit just beyond the spray of the falls, head in my hands.

  What just happened? I can’t believe I let it. No, I didn’t let it. I practically begged. What possessed me to take the glasses off? Touch his face like that? I was upset, broken by my memories, but I Know that’s not the only reason. I lean forward, and every time I breathe it’s a scent that is foreign, male. Beckett. And before I even feel the yank of the memory, I fall …

  … and Beckett’s cheek is rough under my hand. I think he stopped breathing when I touched him. I can see his eyes now, and when I ask the question, he doesn’t hesitate. He lets a smile lift the corner of his mouth, and he says, “Yes.” Like it was the simplest of answers. I close my eyes, and for a moment, the pain of losing Adam lessens. And then I feel Beckett’s lips on mine. They’re softer than I thought they’d be. His grip is stronger than I thought it would be. He kisses me again, and his mouth is warm, and I ache, my fingers tangling in his hair …

  I open my eyes to the present and my lips are flushed, cheeks hot in the chilly air. One way or another, this will be the ruin of me. And Beckett doesn’t know who I am. Not really. He doesn’t know what I am, or what I’ve done. What I’m about to do. To him. And Jillian.

  What am I about to do? Nothing is the way I thought it was. Nothing. Could I really give Beckett, who told me the truth, to a Council who tells nothing but lies? Who gave me bitterblack to hide those lies, so that I could die as horribly as Adam?

  And then I pause, sitting on the cold rocks, in the red dark beside the spraying waterfall. I never finish my memory of Adam’s death. I always pull myself out, crying and shaking. Or Nita would be there to help me do it. But today, while Beckett held me, I went from the dark behind the door all the way to the burning, to the depths of my grief. And there was something there. Something I hadn’t considered.

  I close my eyes, and this time, instead of running or resisting, I go to the high shelf and take down the memory of Adam.

  And I am in Adam’s chamber, and he is writhing on the bed, screaming. I back away from him, horror creeping slow up my spine, sickness and confusion spreading inside me. And when the spasm passes, Adam falls back on the bed, gasping and moaning, and he turns his head, his streaming eyes falling directly on mine. And he whispers, “Who are you?”

  I yank myself back into the roar of the waterfall and the cold of the cave, stunned. Adam Forgot. He caught the Forgetting. Grandpapa Cyrus even told me a supervisor had Forgotten. It seemed so impossible, I hardly believed him at the time, and Adam was only training. But Adam went Outside that day, and there was bitterblack, they said, in the seed samples …

  I jump to my feet, so unsteady I nearly fall. Adam wasn’t testing seed samples. They gave him bitterblack. The Council killed my brother. Killed my Adam to hide the Forgetting. For the same reason they almost killed me. And the ever-simmering rage inside me suddenly cools, gels into something that is icy cold.

  Hate.

  And then I turn, spinning on my heel toward the path up the tumbled rocks. Listening. Maybe that was an echo, a trick of the falling water. Maybe it was the draft. Or maybe that was a voice I just heard, far off down the cartage way.

  I sit still, stunned, then I throw off the blanket. What just happened? What was I doing? What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. Not like I should have been. I want to hit something, preferably something that will hurt me back. But I don’t. I lie in the weird, drying grass, arms over my head in the cold, and count the ways that I am an idiot.

  Samara was vulnerable. She is traumatized, and I have a feeling the brother isn’t the half of it. She is of Canaan, the people I’m supposed to be studying, objectively, like a scientist, and not only have I not been objective at all—as Jill saw fit to point out—I’ve smashed every rule I ever swore to gaining her trust, only now to go and irreparably damage it. And there is Jill, lying still and sick just a few meters away. How unfair is that? And wrong. And the sad thing is, given the opportunity, I’d be tempted to do it again.

  I’m worse than an idiot. I am a fool.

  And then I hear the softest crackle in my ear.

  I sit up, hand to the side of my head. I’d almost forgotten the earpiece was there. But that was definitely, for just a second, a signal. I scramble to find the glasses, tangled up where Samara left them in the blanket, get them on my face, and listen. Nothing. I move around the campsite, hear another fizz and hiss. And when I look up at the hole in the ceiling, where the fiery sky is shining in, a voice full of static says, “Beckett?”

  “Dad?” I whisper. I look around, but I can’t see Samara. Jill is asleep, exactly as I left her. “Dad! Is that you?”

  “Beck! Are you okay? Where are … ” His voice dissolves into white noise.

  “I can barely hear you. I’m okay. We’re underground.”

  “Can you talk?”

  I glance around one more time for Samara. “Yes.”

  “Do you have the … ” I hear a jab of static. “… of the city?”

  “What?”

  “The position of the city?”

  “No. We’re not there yet.”

  “Listen, Beck, and let me know that you understand. Do not send the coordinates to the Commander. Give them only to me.”

  “What?”

  “Only to me, Beckett! There isn’t much time. Your mom is watching the door. Something is wrong. It’s not what they told … ” He’s gone again, then back with a popping noise. “… get in touch if I can. Take the glasses off transmit, so they can’t send a skimmer and up … ” This time the crackle hurts my ear. “… still with the local?”

  “What?”

  “Is the local you’re with hostile?”

  If he means the local I showed our technology to, told about Earth, kissed, and who is now running around somewhere in this cave wearing my jumpsuit, then it’s a more complicated question than Dad could guess. And basically the end of protocol as we know it. “No,” I say.

  “Is Jill all right?”

  Also complicated. “Yes.”

  “I have to … ”

  The connection fizzes. “Dad, why are you watching the door? What’s happening?”

  “Listen, Beck … come back to the base camp.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t come back to the base … or the Centauri. We … ”

  “Dad?”

  “… off transmit … when I can.”

  “Dad!”

  But there’s no static this time. No crack or fizz. I think he’s shut down the connection, and it gives me a bad feeling, deep down in my stomach.

  I take the glasses off transmit, like he told me. Something stinks about this. So much that it reeks. Dad just told me to break orders, and that is not like Dr. Sean Rodriguez. Or not without a good reason. And if they were having trouble t
racking us, setting the glasses on transmit would only help, wouldn’t it? Because if we did wander into a pocket of signal, like we must have just then, it would ping the base camp, and then they’d know exactly where we are … He doesn’t want Commander Faye to know where we are. He doesn’t want her to know where the city is. Why?

  And suddenly I’m not thinking of Samara’s trauma anymore. I’m thinking of her abilities. What would Earth do with a people with perfect recall? Who could pick up the education of a doctor in 185 days? Keep precise time in their heads and remember every detail of a map they saw when they were four? Something tells me a military could get really creative with that. And so could the Commander. If Earth found out the people of New Canaan were that valuable, I’m not sure their culture would survive it.

  But Dad couldn’t know about memory in New Canaan, and neither could Faye. So what’s going on with the Centauri?

  I stare up at the hole in the ceiling. If Dad just shut down that connection because he was caught, and if another ping or two went out before I turned off transmit, then the Commander could know exactly where we are. Right now. And I have Samara. And we’re close to the city.

  And then the perimeter alarm flashes in my vision.

  I run across the cavern, and before I get halfway back to the grasses, Beckett is coming out to meet me. I see from his face that he knows. His technology has warned him. His gaze darts behind me, toward the cartage way.

  “Is there another passage?” I ask.

  “One. Over there.” He nods his head at the other end of the cavern. “But they’re coming that way, too.”

  “Is there another way out?”

  He shakes his head.

  Trapped. “How long?”

  “Six or seven minutes, at a guess.”

  “What do you have?” I say. “Tell me what you can use to get us out!”

  I want him to do something I’ve never thought of. Pull something out of his pack I couldn’t have imagined. I see him thinking, searching his mind. He’s not finding anything. His chest moves up and down, stretching the shirt, jaw clenched tight. I don’t Know what he’s working himself up to do, but I don’t like it. Then he says, “Tell me why you’re running.”

  “Because I Know about the Forgetting when I shouldn’t.”

  “And what will they do when they catch you?”

  “Last time it was poison. I would guess something faster.”

  He takes one of my hands, flips it palm up. “What happened here?”

  I glance down at the new skin, puzzled. “Rope. I slid when I was running away and—”

  “Rope?” Beckett shuts his eyes, then his hand closes over mine. “Rope! You have got to be kidding me. Come on. Quick!”

  He yanks me across the loose rocks, back to the grasses, where he gets his pack out from under Jillian’s head and dumps it out. Jillian groans a little, trying to turn inside the blanket while Beckett digs. I see two of the little packages of food they’ve been eating, an assortment of things I don’t recognize, and then Beckett has a shiny, cone-shaped metal case and bundle of flat, thin ropes. When he shakes the ropes loose, they make a kind of net.

  “We’re going up,” he says, pointing to the hole in the ceiling, eight and a half meters above us.

  I have a sudden vision of Nita’s story, the one with wings on heads. Beckett is talking fast.

  “I’m going to shoot the rope through the hole and climb up, and while I’m doing that you’re going to get Jill in the harness.” He throws me the net of ropes, and I catch it. “Her arms and legs go through here, and you hook it like this … ” He shows me a small metal clamp, and where it attaches. “Then I’m going to bring the rope up and shoot it back down here, you’re going to attach the harness, turn the grip loose, and I’ll retract the rope and haul Jill up. Then I’m going to shoot it back and you’ll get in the harness and do the same thing. Got it? You take the—”

  “You only have to tell me once,” I say.

  He almost smiles. “Right.” He does something with the metal cone, there’s a whoosh, and suddenly the top of the cone is just gone, a thin rope flying up and up and out of the hole in the ceiling. I realize that I don’t have time to be startled. I kneel down and start wrestling Jill into the harness. Beckett tugs and the rope is firm, taut, like it’s been tied, though I can’t imagine to what. It looks too flimsy to be of any use.

  “Do you Know what’s up there?” he asks. He’s flinging belongings back into his pack, snatching my wet clothes from the rocks.

  “I think a barren plain. But we can’t be far from the mountains.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No idea.”

  He gets his pack on, a covering on each hand, grabs the rope, and before he goes, he pauses and says, “That was my fault back there. My mistake, and I’m sorry, okay?”

  He’s talking about kissing me. And he regrets it. Why shouldn’t he? I look at the face I dreamed, and realize I’ve made a decision without making it. They can’t have Beckett. I won’t let them. “How close are they?” I ask.

  “Maybe four minutes. Go fast.”

  He climbs while I finish working Jillian into the ropes. I think I might have her arms where her legs go, but it feels secure. I get her pack while Beckett pulls himself over the edge of the hole in the ceiling, and in a moment the rope zips upward, fast. I drag Jillian by the harness, and the silver end of the rope comes down, spreading into three prongs that drive into the ground and hold there, a tiny green light blinking on top, like when Beckett was mending his bones. Jillian’s eyes open and close, and I look in my mind and watch Beckett attach the metal clamps, to make sure I do it right.

  Jillian mumbles, “Where are we going?”

  “Flying,” I say. I stuff her pack into the harness with her, and when I glance across the cavern, I can see the opposite passage, the one Beckett mentioned, because now it is lit by the pale yellow light of biofuel. They’re coming. I go to “turn the grip loose” like Beckett said, only I don’t see how. And he didn’t say how. It’s just smooth metal, winking with unnatural light.

  “Jillian,” I whisper. “Jillian! How do you make it let go?”

  Jillian opens her blue eyes, sees the hanging rope, and then her lids fall closed again. I hear a distant echo of voices, this time from the cartage way.

  “Jillian,” I say, shaking her a little, “tell me how to make it let go!”

  “Electromagnetic,” she replies, which is the least helpful thing I’ve ever heard her say. And that’s saying quite a bit. Beckett’s head is hanging down through the hole, and he’s beckoning, but I can’t call out without alerting the coming Council. I run my hands all over the metal, desperate, and for no reason I can name, the green light … vanishes. Like someone blew it out. I pull, and the grip releases.

  I wave at Beckett and Jillian lifts to the air, the light jar I’ve crammed into her pack glowing through the cloth. She looks like a rising moon. Lantern light wavers on either side of me, from both passages, as I watch Jillian’s ascent, my pack on my shoulder, my book inside it. I shift my feet. She’s almost to the hole in the ceiling, and we are almost out of time.

  I watch Beckett’s hands pull Jillian up and over the edge, see the empty hole with the empty red sky, and even though I am trapped at the bottom, I feel relieved. That they’re safe. That I can’t give them to the Council. Even for my parents. It’s a red dark without the light jar, and a shadow moves in the opposite passage. I close my eyes. I Know I’m in trouble. I have nothing. No bargain. No Forgetting. No time.

  But I can make a plan.

  So I get back into the city for the Changing of the Seasons, make my very public appearance and hope it’s enough for Thorne Councilman to not make an example of my parents. Then I elude basically everyone Underneath, long enough to get back into that room in the Archives, discover how to Forget, and heal the Knowing before Judgment. Or before the Council kills me first.

  It’s a terrible plan. But I think I’m going to
try. At least I won’t be giving the Council that killed my brother the satisfaction of killing me today. And they don’t get Beckett. The Council can deal with Earth on their own. Earth doesn’t actually seem all that scary right now.

  Not nearly as scary as they are.

  I look up at the empty hole, and I can hear my own pulse in my ears. The echo of conversation from the cartage way. It’s still three days until the Changing of the Seasons. I won’t be able to hide that long. Not in the city. I think I need to go to Annis. Nita’s mother. To the Outside.

  I think I don’t have a way out of this cave.

  Maybe Beckett is packing up Jillian at this moment, getting her back to his “ship.” If he has any sense, that’s exactly what he’s doing. I twist the straps on my pack in my hand. The light from the opposite passage is almost here. They’re coming. And then there’s a noise, and the rope comes streaking down through the hole, the grip embedding itself in the rock at my feet, rope and harness dangling.

  Beckett waves his hand from the ceiling, gesturing for me to hurry. I climb into the harness with my pack, threading in my arms and legs. And now there are feet crunching in the gravel, light bobbing along the cavern walls, and I pause, because the illuminated face walking slowly toward me is the last one I expected to see. Reddix Physicianson.

  I bend down and run my hands all over the metal grip, hoping to repeat the miracle that happened before. It doesn’t work. The green fire doesn’t extinguish. I do it again, the light vanishes, and the grip releases. I have no idea what just happened and I don’t care.

  “Go!” I say to the hole in the ceiling. And I rise. Reddix is still walking toward me, slow and steady, not changing his pace, his head tilting back as I fly. What could he be doing here? Reddix isn’t Council any more than Sonia’s mother. I’m out of reach when he puts his sandals where I was standing, his gaze dark in the shadows. I wish I could read his face as easily as Beckett’s.