The streets below are quiet, the low, slanting sun making the shadows long, blocking out patches of bright light, leaving others in a shrouded dim. Jin’s house is one of the old buildings, and even dry and untended it’s pretty up here, white stone arches mimicking the curve and flow of the fern forest I’ve just been hiking through. Shaping stone like this is a skill we’ve forgotten. Jin doesn’t spend much time in his roof garden, especially in the last, hot days of full sun. He’s old, with no wife, no children he can remember or identify. That, and his nearness to the wall, and the privacy created by the Archives, makes this roof a good one to jump into. Not to mention that the old man is nearly deaf.
I lower my pack to my feet, its tether snaking down around my leg, and for the first time feel my pulse begin to slow. I’m not caught. I’m not going to be flogged. At least not today. I reach for my falling braids, seven or eight of them out of their pins and brushing the bare skin of my waist. I’ve taken the tail end of my tunic and tucked it back through my collar in a way that makes my mother frown, but it’s cooler like this, and useful when the foliage is dense. Extra fabric snags. I re-braid and pin, braid and pin, fast, getting them as neat as I can. I have to get home before my mother sees my empty bed. Sometimes I think she knows when I’ve been out, deep down, but appearing at least somewhat presentable helps her keep up the sham.
Did you have a good resting, Nadia? she’ll say to me, even though my tunic will be wrinkled where it was pulled through my collar and I’ll have dirt on my knees that wasn’t there when the curtains closed. You’ve brought the water? Thank you …
And I’ll say nothing, because I never do, and she’ll say nothing about the yellow apple on the table, an apple she would know didn’t come from our stores if she’d bothered to count. But once in a while her brow will crease, as if she’s unsure. Confused. Maybe she is. I’m not sure how many Forgettings my mother has lived through. She wears her book on twine, heavy around her neck, but I know she doesn’t remember me. Not really.
“Have a good resting, Nadia the Dyer’s daughter?”
I snatch up my tethered pack, my last hairpin lost to the grasses. That voice was not my mother’s. It was deep and very male, coming from the shaded shadows beyond the arches, beneath the covered corner of Jin’s garden. I step back, glancing once at the place I’ve hidden the pole. I’ll never get the ladder back in time. The roof is too high to jump from and the voice is between me and the stairs to the street. Correction: Today is the day I’m caught. I feel sweat on my neck, and not from the sun.
The shadows in the corner shift, reshape, become a person, and then the person steps into the light. Not Jonathan, or any other member of the Council. It’s Gray. The glassblower’s son. Of all people. He’s taller since we finished our time in the Learning Center, the weeks of sunlight leaving deep gold in the dark brown of his hair. But that smile he wears is the same. “Cheeky” is what his own mother might call him. I just call him a zopa, a word my mother sometimes uses, though not if she thinks I can hear.
Gray hooks a thumb on the lower end of the book strap that crosses his chest, waiting for me to do something. I think what I would say if I were a normal person. Hey. Or maybe, How long have you been on this roof? Or, Why, exactly, are you on this roof? Which way did you take to sneak up here during the resting? Does your hair really grow all wild and curly like that?
He just stands there, grinning at me. I wish I’d listened to Mother and never tucked up the end of my tunic. But it’s much more important to know what else Gray the Glassblower’s son has seen. I break my ban against frivolous conversation and say, “What are you doing here?”
The grin widens. “Nadia speaks. I’m impressed. What else have you learned to do since school?”
Zopa, I think. He seems to think this is funny. I don’t. I notice he hasn’t answered my question. I decide not to answer his.
“So,” he says, “come up to Jin’s often?”
I can’t tell if he’s teasing me or threatening me. The quiet stretches out long, waiting for my explanation, until I say, “I’ve come to request from Jin, that’s all. We need signs.”
“True. The Forgetting is coming. We could all use a few more labels, I guess. Probably worth a flogging to get them an hour before the leaving bell, ten weeks ahead of time. No, I agree with you, Nadia. Plan ahead. Avoid that last-minute rush.”
Sarcasm. Perfect. I think of the only other time I’ve spoken actual words to the glassblower’s son. He was at least a third of a meter shorter then, in the learning room, and we were meant to be self-exploring the seeds for planting. Gray was self-exploring the art of teasing me. I ignored him through two bells, the same way I ignored everyone, until finally he tugged on the cord of my book, worn hanging from my belt in those days. I looked him in the eye and said one word: “Stop.” And then he grabbed my book and opened it. My book. I’d have rather found him peeking through the door of the latrine. I slapped his face, hard, and then I slapped it again. Gray left me alone after that, and I’ve carried my book in a pack ever since. I doubt the same strategy is going to work here. But the memory has done me good; it’s reminded me of my temper, which always helps me speak. And I need to know what he’s seen. This time I look him in the face.
“You must have an urgent need for signs yourself,” I observe, “since you seem to be taking the same risk.”
“Well spotted, Dyer’s daughter.” He moves across the garden to sit on the low stone wall that runs along the edge, crosses one ankle over the other, and leans back, relaxed. There’s a two-story drop behind him. “But I came straight here. You took the long way around to Jin’s, didn’t you? The really long way.”
Question answered. He’s seen everything. Whatever this game is, I’m done playing. “I’ll be long gone before you can get Jonathan here,” I say. Jonathan might not be easily found, since he was just wandering the streets.
“I’m sure I can find someone who would be interested.”
“I’ll deny it. It will be your word against mine.”
“And you don’t have one thing in that pack, or in your house, that has come from over the wall?”
The apples. I can feel the weight of them alongside my book. And there are the plant cuttings. They’ll have to be gotten rid of. Quick. Plus the crystals in my resting room. I won’t be able to do it. Not in time. Something inside me tightens, and I realize just how much I did not want today to be my day. Gray gets up and crosses the garden grasses, his trademark smirk for once not present. He stands right over me.
“Tell me how many times you’ve been over the wall.”
I watch the empty sky beyond his shoulder.
“Tell me, or I bring them.”
I put my gaze on his. “Once.”
“Liar.”
The word feels like he’s finally slapped me back. One clear bell rings out over the city. The first of the day, for waking. Mother will check my bed soon. I have to go. We both have to go. “What do you want?”
“I’m glad you asked. I want you to take me with you.”
Where? I think. But that smile is back, and I realize he means over the wall. He wants me, Nadia, to take him, Gray, over the wall. This strikes me as the single most stupid thing I’ve heard in a lifetime of stupid things. “No.”
“Yes.”
I glare at him.
“I go with you, or I bring the Council,” he says. “Take it or leave it.”
I’m more than mad now. I’m afraid. Would he turn me in, watch my back being laid open like Hedda’s? I don’t know the answer, and that means I’m cornered. He’s intent, watching me think. His eyelashes are startlingly long. I drop my gaze and nod once.
“When?” he asks.
“Three days.”
“The sun will be setting by then.”
I look him again in the eye. “Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it, then.” And here comes the smirk. “I’ll meet you here. First bell of the resting.”
“
Fourth bell.”
“Oh, no. You’ll come at the first. Like you always do. Three days, Nadia the Dyer’s daughter.” He moves backward into the shadows, still grinning at me. And right before he disappears down the stairs, he says, “Don’t forget.”
I stay exactly where I am until his footsteps have faded, then dart to the edge of the roof to see how he manages the streets before the leaving bell. I don’t see him. He’s gone another way. I move out of the sun and sink down into the dark corner where Gray must have been, watching me lie on top of the wall, jump into Jin’s garden, get rid of the ladder. Braid my hair. And now that I’m alone and out of the heat, I’m shaking inside. I’m not going to be flogged. Not today. But I have been caught. Don’t forget, he said.
I measure my breaths, take my book out of my pack and run a hand over its thick cover, feel the long, connected tether that keeps it tied to my belt. I’ve been taught to write truth in my book since I was old enough to hold a pen. Our books are our sole identity after the Forgetting, the string that connects us to who we were before. The one thing we should never, ever be separated from. Don’t forget. I hear the words again in my head, this time in the voice of a child. Gray doesn’t know it, but he’s said that to me before.
And then the shaking in my middle shoots outward—legs, arms, fingers, scalp—the panic I managed to fend off on the wall slamming hard into my chest, squeezing out the air. I hear my mother’s screams, her fists banging on the barred door of her resting room, my older sister with her, pleading with my father. The baby cries in her cradle seat, and I flatten myself against the wall beneath the window, where pots of seedlings make a line across the sill above my head. I was Nadia the Planter’s daughter then, in my sixth year, and my father had let me plant those seeds, touch the tiny shoots of green and orange springing up to meet the light. I’d been so sure that he loved me.
My father takes my hand, leads me away from the window, and sits me in my chair, feet dangling, the light of sunrising painting our walls with blotches of pink and gold. Then he picks up our knife and cuts the tether of my book. I see the book leave my body, watch it cross the room without me in my father’s hands.
“Don’t cry, Nadia,” he says while he cries, “it’s almost time to forget.”
He is a stranger. My father has become a stranger who did what he said I should never do, who cut off a piece of me and took it away. And so I run. As fast as I can, out the door, losing the sound of his voice as he calls, and it’s as if the pain and confusion inside me have somehow bled into the streets. Everything is noise and stinging smoke, breaking glass and laughter—laughter that is more frightening than my mother’s screams. I don’t know where I am. Ribbons hang from the trees. Nothing looks the same. My book doesn’t bump against my leg. The stone walk is slippery and I fall and someone tries to grab me and then I run and I run more and that is when I see the brown-headed boy in the place where they make the glass.
The furnace is glowing, and the boy is squirming and kicking. A man has him by the arm, and the man has taken the boy’s book. The glassblower shouts at the man, shakes his head no, and I am angry, so angry that someone else’s book has been cut, and then I see the man throw the boy’s book, watch it land near the bright orange opening of the furnace.
I run into the workshop and I hit the man. I hit and hit him and then someone hits me and I land hard on the ground, heavy tools clattering down onto my legs. The man and the glassblower are fighting, the heat of the furnace pushing on my face. The cover of the boy’s book has caught fire, flames eating his pages, and the boy reaches through the heat and grabs it. He drops his book to the floor, smothering the fire with his hands and chest, yelling because he is burned. The men hit each other, and when the fire is gone the boy holds his smoking book with red hands, and he looks at me and says, “Don’t forget.”
I find my feet and run, down the white stone streets, between the white houses. Light is peeking over the edge of the mountains, from beyond the walls, and the sun comes in a sliver of gold. Then the sky bursts. A broken-glass sky like in the boy’s shop—sharp, bright light that pierces the gold with dazzling shards. The trees bloom, just like Father said they would, all the white flowers opening one by one while the ribbons flutter, as far as I can see on either side of the street. The air is sweet. Stone, light, flowers—it’s too bright. I crouch and cover my eyes.
When I can open them again I see a man leaning against a locked door. His hand falls down to the book at his side, and I watch his face empty, like when Mother pours water from a pitcher. When there is nothing left in the man’s face he wanders away, past a baby lying in its blanket in the middle of the street. I can’t see whether the baby has a book or not, and then I hear a woman cry. And even though I can’t make sense of my world I do understand that this noise is different. The woman isn’t crying because she’s afraid she might die; she cries because she has lost her life. She has forgotten. Everyone has forgotten, and the sound of it hurts my ears.
I push myself up and go home, slipping on the stones. I don’t know where else to go. I’m bruised and tired and I hurt. I want my mother. My father isn’t there when I open the door, and even this room looks unfamiliar in the cracked white light. The baby has cried herself to sleep in the cradle seat. There are no seedlings in the window, but on the table is a book, open to the first page. It says Nadia the Dyer’s daughter. But that is not my book. I push until I lift the bar across the door to my mother’s resting room.
“Mother?” I call.
And there she is, just as she’s always been, my sister huddling in the corner. Mother blinks once, twice, and when her eyes find me she jumps back. Scrambles away.
“Who are you?” my mother yells. “Get away from me! Get away!”
I go away and sit on the floor beneath our table. I hug my knees and I rock and rock. And then I know what has made me slip and fall in the streets. I’m sticky with blood.
I rock now, hugging my shaking knees in the shade of Jin’s garden, beneath his beautiful arches, my book tight against my chest. A book must contain the truth. We are supposed to write the truth, for no one to see but ourselves. But how easily that truth can be twisted. Bend a little here, omit a little there, make yourself into the person you wish you were instead of the person you are. How easy to cut the truth away, to throw it in a fire, open your eyes, and have the whole world remember nothing of who you are. Nothing of what you’ve done. When you will not remember who you are or what you’ve done. My father lives on the other side of Canaan now, with Lydia the Weaver. He has two children, girls, and passes me in the street without a second glance. He got what he wanted and got rid of what he didn’t. What a victimless crime. Like everything before the Forgetting. Guiltless. Forgotten. Unless you can remember.
Don’t forget, Gray the Glassblower’s son has said to me. Twice.
And he’s said it to the only person in Canaan who never has.
Copyright © 2017 Sharon Cameron
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ISBN 978-0-545-94524-0
First edition, October 2017
Jacket art © 2017 by Michael Heath
Jacket design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
e-ISBN 978-0-545-94525-7
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