by Ally Condie
Ky doesn’t move either. How can you? I think, angry. Help her!
But even while he holds still, his eyes hold Xander’s. Ky’s lips move. “Yours,” he whispers, looking at Xander.
For a split second, Xander doesn’t understand; and then at the same moment he does, I do, too.
But here is the difference between us. Xander doesn’t hesitate once he knows what Ky means. “Of course,” Xander whispers, and he reaches for his tablet container. Now that he knows what to do, he’s fast, he’s smooth, he’s Xander.
He puts his own green tablet in Em’s mouth. I don’t think she knows what’s happening; she’s shaking so much, she’s so afraid. She swallows reflexively; I doubt she tastes anything as it goes down.
Almost immediately, her body relaxes. “Thank you,” she says to us, closing her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’ve been worrying too much about the Banquet. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I whisper, looking at Xander and then at Ky.
Between the two of them, they’ve pulled it off. For a moment, I wonder why Ky didn’t give Em his tablet, but then I remember. He’s an Aberration. And Aberrations aren’t allowed to carry tablets of their own.
Does Xander know now? Did Ky just give himself away?
But I don’t think Xander guessed. Why would he? It makes as much sense for him to give Em the tablet as it would for Ky. More, even. Xander has known Em longer. He settles back in his seat, watching Em as he takes her pulse, his hand around her delicate wrist. He looks up at Ky and me and nods. “Everything’s fine now,” he says. “She’s going to be fine.”
I put my arm around Em, and close my eyes, too, listening to the music. The song the woman was singing has ended, and now it’s the Anthem of the Society, bass notes rumbling, choir coming in for the final verse. Their voices sound triumphant; they sing as one. Like us. We closed around Em in a circle to protect her from the eyes of the Officials; and none of us will tell about the green tablet.
I am glad that all is well, glad that I promised to let Em borrow the compact for her Banquet. For what is the point of having something lovely if you never share it?
It would be like having a poem, a beautiful wild poem that no one else has, and burning it.
After a moment, I open my eyes and glance over at Ky. He doesn’t look back, but I know he knows I’m watching. The music is soft, slow. His chest rises and falls. His lashes are black, impossibly long, the exact color of his hair.
Ky is right. I will never hear this song the same way again.
CHAPTER 14
At work the next day, we all notice immediately when the Officials enter the room. Like dominos falling at a game table, head after head turns toward the door of the sorting center. The Officials in their white uniforms are here for me. Everyone knows it and I know it, so I don’t wait for them. I push my chair back and stand up, my eyes meeting theirs across the dividers that separate our slots.
It’s time for my test. They nod for me to follow.
So I do, heart pounding but head held high, to a small gray room with a single chair and several small tables.
As I sit down, Norah appears in the doorway. She seems slightly anxious but gives me a reassuring smile before she looks at the Officials. “Do you need anything?”
“No, thank you,” says an Official with gray hair, who looks significantly older than the other two. “We’ve brought everything we require.”
None of the three Officials makes small talk as they set things in order. The Official who spoke first seems to be in charge. The others, both women, are efficient and smooth. They hook up a datatag behind my ear and one inside the neck of my shirt. I don’t say anything, not even when the gel they use stings my skin.
The two women step back and the older Official slides a small screen across the table toward me. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I say, hoping my voice sounds level and clear. I straighten my shoulders and sit up a little taller. If I act as though I’m not afraid maybe they will believe me. Although the datatags they’ve attached to me might tell a different story, thanks to my racing pulse.
“Then you may begin.”
The first sort is a numbers one, a simple one, a warmup. They are fair. They want me to get my legs under me before they move into the hard sorts.
As I sort the numbers on the screen, making order out of chaos and detecting patterns, my heartbeat evens out. I stop trying to hold onto so many other things—the memory of Xander’s kiss, what my father has done, curiosity about Ky, worry about Em in the music hall, confusion about myself and how I am meant to be and who I am meant to love. I let it all go like a child with a handful of balloons on her First Day at First School. They float away from me, bright and dancing on the breeze, but I don’t look up and I don’t try to grab them back. Only when I hold onto nothing can I be the best, only then can I be what they expect me to be.
“Excellent,” the oldest Official says as he inputs the scores. “Quite excellent. Thank you, Cassia.”
The female Officials remove my datatags. They meet my eyes and smile at me because now they can’t be accused of showing any partiality. The test is finished. And it seems that I have passed, at least.
“It’s been a pleasure,” the gray-haired Official says, reaching across the small table toward me. I stand up and shake his hand and then the hands of the other two Officials. I wonder if they can feel the current of energy that runs through me: The blood in my veins is made of adrenaline and relief. “That was an exceptional demonstration of sorting ability.”
“Thank you, sir.”
On their way out the door, he turns back to me one last time and says, “We have our eyes on you now, young lady.”
He shuts the metal door behind him. It makes a thick, solid sound, a sound of finality. As I listen to the nothing that follows I suddenly realize why Ky likes to blend in. It is a strange feeling, knowing for certain that the Officials watch me more closely. It is as though I stood in the way when that door swung shut and I find myself pinned now by the weight of their observation—a concrete thing, real and heavy.
The night of Em’s Match Banquet I go to bed early and fall asleep quickly. It is my night to wear the datatags and I hope the information they gather from my dreams shows the sleep patterns of a completely normal seventeen-year-old girl.
But in my dream I’m sorting for the Officials again. The screen comes up with Em’s picture and I’m supposed to sort her into a Matching pool. I freeze. My hands stop. My brain stops.
“Is there a problem?” the gray-haired Official asks.
“I can’t tell where I should sort her,” I say.
He looks at Em’s face on the screen and smiles. “Ah. That’s not a problem. She has your compact, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“She’ll carry her tablets to the Banquet in it, as you did. Simply tell her to take the red one and everything will be fine.”
Suddenly I’m at the Banquet, pushing through girls in dresses and boys in suits and parents in plainclothes. I turn them, shove them, do whatever I have to do to see their faces, because everyone here wears yellow and it all blurs together, I can’t sort, I can’t see.
I spin another girl around.
Not Em.
I accidentally knock a tray full of cake out of a waiter’s hand, trying to catch up to a girl with a graceful walk. The tray falls on the floor and the cake breaks apart, like soil falling from roots.
Not Em.
The crowd thins, and a girl in a yellow dress stands alone in front of a blank screen.
Em.
She’s about to cry.
“It’s all right!” I call out to her, pushing my way through more people. “Take the tablet and everything will be fine!”
Em’s eyes brighten; she pulls out my compact. She lifts the green tablet and puts it in her mouth, fast.
“No!” I cry out, too late. “The—”
She puts the blue tablet in her mouth next.
&n
bsp; “—red one!” I finish, pushing through one last cluster of people to stand in front of her.
“I don’t have one,” she says, turning around, her back toward the screen now. She shows me the open compact, empty. Her eyes are sad. “I don’t have a red tablet.”
“You can have mine,” I say, eager to share with her, eager to help her this time. I won’t sit idly by. I pull out my container, twist the top, put the red tablet right into her hand.
“Oh, thank you, Cassia,” she says. She lifts it to her mouth. I see her swallow.
Everyone in the room has stopped milling about. They all look at us now, eyes on Em. What will the red tablet do? None of us knows, except me. I smile. I know it will save her.
Behind Em the screen flashes on with her Match—right in time for him to see Em fall down, dead. Her body makes a heavy sound when it falls, in contrast to the lightness of her eyes fluttering shut, of her dress fluttering in folds around her, of her hands fluttering open like the wings of something small.
I wake up sweating and freezing at the same time, and it takes me a minute to calm myself down. Even though the Officials have laughed at the notion that the red tablet is a death tablet, the rumors still persist. That explains why I dreamed about it killing Em.
Just because I dreamed it doesn’t mean it’s true.
The sleep tags feel sticky on my skin, and I wish I didn’t have to wear them tonight. At least the nightmare isn’t a recurring one, so I can’t be accused of obsessing over something. Besides, I don’t think they can tell exactly what I dreamed. Just that I did. And a teenage girl having an occasional nightmare can’t be uncommon. No one will flag that particular piece of data when it loads to my file.
But the gray-haired Official said that they had their eyes on me.
I stare up into the dark with an ache in my chest that makes it hard to breathe. But not hard to think.
Ever since the day of Grandfather’s Final Banquet last month, I’ve gone back and forth between wishing he had never given me that paper and being glad that he did. Because at least I have the words to describe what I feel is happening inside of me: the dying of the light.
If I couldn’t name it, would I even know what it is? Would I even feel it at all?
I pick up the microcard that the Official gave me in the greenspace and tiptoe toward the port. I need to see Xander’s face; I need reassurance that everything is in order.
I stop short. My mother stands at the portscreen talking to someone. Who would contact her so late at night?
My father sees me from the front room, where he sits on the divan waiting for my mother to finish. He gestures for me to come in and sit next to him. When I do, he glances at the microcard in my hands and smiles and teases like any father would. “Seeing Xander at school isn’t enough? You want to catch another glimpse of him before you go to sleep?”
He puts his arm around me and gives me a hug. “I understand. I was the same way with your mother. That was back when they let us print out a picture from the ports right away instead of making us wait until after our first meeting.”
“What did your parents think of Mama being a Farmlander?”
My father pauses. “Well, they were both a little concerned, to be honest. They never thought I’d Match with someone who didn’t live in a City. But it didn’t take them long to decide they were happy about it.” He gets that smile on his face, the one he always gets when he talks about falling in love. “It only took that first meeting to change their minds. You should have seen your mother then.”
“Why did you meet in the City instead of in the Farmlands?” I ask. Usually, it’s customary for the first meeting to be held close to the girl’s home. There’s always an Official from the Match Department present to make sure things go smoothly.
“She insisted on coming here even though it was a long train ride. She wanted to see the City as soon as possible. My parents and the Official and I all went to the station to meet her.”
He pauses and I know he is picturing the meeting in his mind, imagining my mother stepping off that air train.
“And?” I know I sound impatient, but I have to remind him that he’s not back in the past. He’s here in the present and I need to know everything I can about the Match that made me.
“When she stepped off the train, your grandmother said to me, ‘She still has the sun on her face.’” My father pauses and smiles. “She did, too. I’d never seen anyone look so warm and alive. My parents never voiced a concern about her again. I think we all fell in love with her that day.”
Neither of us notice my mother standing in the doorway until she clears her throat. “And I with all of you.” She seems a little sad, and I wonder if she’s thinking of Grandfather or Grandmother or both. She and my father are now the last two people left who remember that day, except for maybe the Official who oversaw their meeting.
“Who called so late on the port?” I ask.
“Someone from work,” my mother says. Looking weary, she sits down next to my father and leans her head on his shoulder as he puts his arm around her. “I have to leave on a trip tomorrow.”
“Why?”
My mother yawns, her blue eyes opening wide. Her face is still sun-kissed from all her work outdoors. She looks a little older than usual and for the first time I see a bit of gray interwoven in her thick blond hair, some shadows in the sunlight. “It’s late, Cassia. You should be asleep. I should be asleep. I’ll tell you and Bram all about it in the morning.”
I don’t protest. I close my hand over the microcard and say, “All right.” Before I leave for my room my mother leans over to give me a kiss good night.
Once I’m back in my room I listen through the walls again. Something about my mother leaving right now alarms me. Why now? Where is she going? How long will she be gone? She rarely goes on trips for work.
“So?” my father says in the other room. He’s trying to keep his voice quiet. “Is everything all right? I can’t think of the last time we’ve had a call so late at night.”
“I can’t tell. Something seems to be going on, but I don’t know what it is. They’re pulling a few of us from other Arboretums to come look at a crop at the Arboretum in Grandia Province.” Her voice has the singsong quality that it gets when it’s very late and she’s very tired. I remember it from the nights when she used to tell me those flower stories and I feel reassured. If she doesn’t think something is wrong, then everything must be fine. My mother is one of the smartest people I know.
“How long will you be gone?” my father asks.
“A week at the most. Do you think Cassia and Bram will be all right? It’s rather a long trip.”
“They’ll understand.” There’s a pause. “Cassia still seems upset. About the sample.”
“I know. I worry about that.” My mother sighs, a soft sound that somehow I still hear through the wall. “It was an honest mistake. I hope she sees that soon.”
Mistake? It wasn’t a mistake, I think. And then I realize: She doesn’t know. He hasn’t told her. My father has a secret from my mother.
And I have a horrible thought.
So their Match isn’t perfect after all.
The moment I think it, I wish it back. If their Match isn’t perfect, then what are the chances that mine will be?
The next morning, another thunderstorm tumbles the leaves on the maple trees and showers rain on the newroses. I’m eating my breakfast, oatmeal again, steaming in its foilware dish when I hear the port announce: Cassia Reyes, your leisure activity, hiking, has been canceled for the day due to inclement weather. Please report to Second School for extra study hours instead.
No hiking. Which means no Ky.
The walk to the air train is a wet one, and muggy. The rain adds to the water in the air; trapping the humidity. My coppery hair begins to tangle and curl, as it does sometimes in weather like this. I look up at the sky but only see the mass of clouds, no break anywhere.
No one else is on my
air train, not Em, not Xander, not Ky. They probably caught other trains, or are still getting ready, but I have a sense of something missed, something missing. Someone missing.
Maybe it is me.
Once I’m at school, I go upstairs to the research library, where there are several ports. I want to find out about Dylan Thomas and Alfred Lord Tennyson and if they have any poems that did make the selection. I don’t think they did, but I have to make sure.
My fingers hover over the screen on the port as I hesitate. The fastest way to find out would be to type in their names, but then there would be a record of someone searching for them and the search could be traced back to me. It’s much safer to go through the lists of poets in the Hundred Poems database instead. If I’m looking through poet after poet after poet, that will seem more like an assignment for class and less like a search for something specific.
It takes a long time to go through each name, but I finally get to the Ts. I find one poem by Tennyson and I want to read it but I don’t have time. There is no Thomas. There is a Thoreau. I touch that name; one poem of his, The Moon, has been saved. I wonder if he wrote anything else. If he did, it is gone now.
Why did Grandfather give me those poems? Did he want me to find some meaning in them? Does he not want me to go gentle? What does that even mean? Am I supposed to fight against authority? I might as well ask if he wants me to commit suicide. Because that’s what it would be. I wouldn’t actually die, but if I tried to break the rules they’d take away everything I value. A Match. A family of my own. A good vocation. I would have nothing. I don’t think Grandfather would want that for me.
I can’t figure it out. I’ve thought and thought about it and turned the words over in my head. I wish I could see the words again on paper and puzzle it out. For some reason, I feel like everything would be different if I could see them outside of myself, not only in my mind.
I’ve realized one thing, though. Even though I’ve done the right thing—burned the words and tried to forget them—it doesn’t work. These words won’t go away.