by Ally Condie
“There’s a delivery for you,” Bram tells me when I arrive home, his face eager. “Someone brought it by. It must be something good. I had to have my fingerprint entered in their datapod when I accepted it.”
He follows me into the kitchen where a small package sits on the table. Looking at the pulpy brown paper wrapped around it, I think how much of Ky’s story he could put on those pages. But he can’t do that anymore. It’s too dangerous.
Still, I can’t help but open the paper carefully. I smooth it out neatly, taking my time. This almost drives Bram crazy. “Come on! Hurry up!” Deliveries don’t happen every day.
When Bram and I finally see what’s in the package we both sigh. Bram’s is a sigh of disappointment and mine is a sigh of something else I can’t quite define. Longing? Nostalgia?
It’s the scrap of my dress from the Match Banquet. In keeping with tradition they have placed the silk between two pieces of clear glass with a small silver frame around the edge. The glass and the material both reflect the light, blinding me for a moment and reminding me of the glass mirror in my lost compact. I stare at the fabric, trying to remember the night at the Match Banquet when we were all pink and red and gold and green and violet and blue.
Bram groans. “That’s all it is? A piece of your dress?”
“What did you think, Bram?” I say, and the acid in my tone surprises me. “Did you think they were going to send our artifacts back? Did you think this was going to be your watch? Because it’s not. We’re not getting any of it back. Not the compact. Not the watch. Not Grandfather.”
Shock and hurt register on my brother’s face, and before I can say anything he leaves the room. “Bram!” I call after him. “Bram—”
I hear the sound of his door closing.
I pick up the box that the framed sample came in. As I do, I realize that it is the perfect size to hold a watch. My brother dared to hope, and I mocked him for it.
I want to take this frame and walk to the middle of the greenspace. I’ll stand next to that dry fountain and wait until the Official finds me. And when she does and asks me what I’m doing, I’ll tell her and everyone else that I know: they are giving us pieces of a real life instead of the whole thing. And I’ll tell her that I don’t want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing.
They have perfected the art of giving us just enough freedom; just enough that when we are ready to snap, a little bone is offered and we roll over, belly up, comfortable and placated like a dog I saw once when we visited my grandparents in the Farmlands. They’ve had decades to perfect this; why am I surprised when it works on me again and again and again?
Even though I am ashamed of myself, I take the bone. I worry it between my teeth. Ky has to be safe. That’s what matters.
I don’t take the green tablet; I’m still stronger than they are. But not strong enough to burn the last bit of Ky’s story before reading it, the piece he pressed into my hand earlier on our way back down through the forest. No more after this, I tell myself. Only this, no more.
This picture is the first one with color. A red sun, low in the sky, right on the napkin crease again so that it is part of both boys, both lives. The younger Ky has dropped the words of father and mother; they have vanished from the picture. Forgotten, or left behind, or so much a part of him that they don’t have to be written anymore. He looks over at the older Ky, reaches for him.
they were too much to carry
so I left them behind
for a new life, in a new place
but no one forgot who I was
I didn’t
and neither did the people who watch
they watched for years
they watch now
The older, current Ky’s hands are in handlocks in front of him, an Official on each side. He’s colored his hands red, too—I don’t know if he means to represent the way they look after he’s been working, or if he means something else. His parents’ blood still on his hands from all those years ago, even though he did not kill them.
The hands of the Officials are red, too. And I recognize one of them; he’s caught her face in a few lines, a few sharp strokes.
My Official. She came for him, too.
CHAPTER 23
The next morning I wake to a shrieking so high and keening that I bolt straight out of bed, tearing the sleep tags from my skin.
“Bram!” I scream.
He is not in his room.
I run down the hall to my parents’ room. My mother came home from her trip last night; they should both be there. But their room is empty, too, and I can tell they left in a hurry: I see twisted sheets and a blanket on the floor. I draw back. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen their bed unmade and, even in the fear of the moment, the intimacy of that tangled bedding catches my eye.
“Cassia?” My mother’s voice.
“Where are you?” I call in a panic, turning around.
She hurries down the hall toward me, still wearing her sleepclothes. Her long, blond hair streams behind her, and she looks almost unearthly until she pulls me into arms that feel real and strong. “What happened?” she asks me. “Are you all right?”
“The screaming—” I say, looking around her for the source. Just then I hear another sound added to the screaming: the sound of metal on wood.
“It’s not screaming,” my mother says, her voice sad. “You’re hearing the saws. They’re cutting down the maple trees.”
I hurry out onto the front steps where Bram and my father also stand. Other families wait outside, too, many of them still wearing their sleepclothes like us. This is another intimacy so shocking and unusual that I am taken aback. I can’t think of another time when I’ve seen any of my neighbors dressed like this.
Or maybe I can. The time when Patrick Markham went out and walked up and down the street in his sleepclothes after his son died, and Xander’s father found him and brought him home.
The saw bites into the trunk of our maple tree, slices through so fast and clean that at first I think nothing happened except the scream. The tree seems fine for a brief moment, but it is dead as it stands. Then it falls.
“Why?” I ask my mother.
When she doesn’t answer right away, my father puts his arm around her and tells me. “The maple trees have become too much of a problem. The leaves get too messy in the fall. They’re not growing uniformly. For example, ours grew too big. Em’s is too small. And some of them have diseases, so they all need to be chopped down.”
I look at our tree, at its leaves still reaching for the sun, still working to turn light into food. They don’t know they are dead yet. Our yard looks like a different place without the tree standing tall in front of our house. Things seem smaller.
I look over at Em’s house. Her yard, on the other hand, doesn’t look much different now that their sad little tree is gone, the one that never quite grew. It was never much more than a stick-stalk of a tree with a little burst of leaves on the top. “It’s not as bad for Em,” I say. “Her tree isn’t as much of a loss.”
“It’s sad for all of us,” my mother says fiercely.
Last night when I couldn’t sleep, I crouched down near the wall to listen to her talk with my father. They spoke so softly that I couldn’t make out any of the words, but she sounded tired and sad. Eventually I gave up and climbed back into bed. Now she looks angry, standing in front of the house with her arms folded across her chest.
The workers with the saws have already moved on to another house now that our tree is down. That part was easy. Tearing up the roots will be the hard part.
My father holds my mother close. He doesn’t love the trees the way she does; but he loves other things that were destroyed and he understands. My mother loves the plants; my father loves the history of things. They love each other.
And I love them both.
It isn’t only myself and Ky and Xander I’ll hurt if I commit an Infraction. It’s all these other p
eople I love.
“It’s a warning,” my mother says, almost to herself.
“I didn’t do anything!” Bram exclaims. “I haven’t even been late to school in weeks!”
“The warning isn’t for you,” my mother says. “It’s for someone else.”
My father puts his hands on my mother’s shoulders and it is as though they are alone, the way he looks at her. “Molly, I promise. I didn’t ...”
And at the same time, I open my mouth to say something—I don’t know what—something about what I have done and how this is all my fault. But before my father can finish and I can begin, my mother speaks.
“It’s a warning for me.”
She turns and goes back into the house, brushing a hand across her eyes. As I watch her go, the guilt slices quick through me like the cuts in the tree.
I don’t think the warning is for my mother.
If the Officials truly can see my dreams, they should be happy with what I dreamed last night. I burned the last of Ky’s story in the incinerator, but afterward I kept thinking of what it showed, what it told me: The sun was red and low in the sky when the Officials came to get him.
So then, when I dreamed, I saw scene after scene of Ky surrounded by Officials in their white uniforms with a red sky behind him, a glimpse of sun waiting on the horizon. Whether it was rising or setting, I could not tell; I had no sense of direction in the dream. In each dream he did not show any fear. His hands did not shake; his expression remained calm. But I knew he was afraid, and when the red light of the sun hit his face it looked like blood.
I do not want to see this scene played out in real life. But I have to know more. How did he escape last time? What happened?
The two desires struggle within me: the desire to be safe, and the desire to know. I cannot tell which one will win.
My mother hardly speaks as we ride the train to the Arboretum together. She looks over at me and smiles now and then, but I can tell she’s deep in thought. When I ask her questions about her trip, she answers carefully, and finally I stop.
Ky rides the same air train we do, and he and I walk together toward the Hill. I try to act friendly but reserved—the way we once were around each other—even though I want to touch his hand again, to look in his eyes and ask him about the story. About what happened next.
It only takes a few seconds in the forest before I lose control and I have to ask him. I put my hand on his arm as we follow our path to the spot where we last marked. When I touch him he smiles at me, and it warms my heart and makes it hard to take my hand away, to let go. I don’t know if I can do this, despite wanting him to be safe even more than I want him.
“Ky. An Official contacted me yesterday. She knows about us. They know about us.”
Ky nods. “Of course they do.”
“Did they talk to you, too?”
“They did.”
For someone who has spent his entire life avoiding attention from the Officials, he seems remarkably composed about this. His eyes are deep as ever but there is a calm there that I haven’t seen before.
“Aren’t you worried?”
Ky doesn’t answer. Instead, he reaches into the pocket of his shirt and pulls out a paper. He hands it to me. It’s different from the brown paper of napkins and wrappings that he’s been using—whiter, smoother. The writing on it is not his own. It’s from some kind of port or scribe, but something about it seems foreign.
“What is this?” I ask.
“A late birthday present for you. A poem.”
My jaw drops—a poem? How?—and Ky hurries to reassure me. “Don’t worry. We’ll destroy the paper soon so we don’t get in trouble. It won’t take long to memorize.” His face is alight with happiness and I suddenly realize that Ky looks the slightest bit like Xander, with his face open and joyful like this. I am reminded of the shifting faces on the portscreen the day after I got my Match, when I saw Xander, then Ky. But now, I see only Ky. Only Ky and no one else.
A poem. “Did you write it?”
“No,” he says, “but it’s by the same man who wrote the other poem. Do not go gentle.”
“How?” I ask him. There were no other poems by Dylan Thomas in the port at school.
Ky shakes his head, evading my question. “It’s not the whole thing. I could only afford part of a stanza.” Before I can ask what he gave in exchange for the poem, he clears his throat a little nervously and looks down at his hands. “I liked it because it mentions a birthday and because it reminds me of you. How I felt when I saw you that first day, in the water at the pool.” He looks confused and I see a trace of sadness on his face. “Don’t you like it?”
I hold the white paper, but my eyes are so blurred with tears that I can’t read it. “Here,” I say, thrusting the poem back at him. “Will you read it to me?” I turn away and start walking through the trees, staggering almost, so blinded am I by the beauty of his surprise and so overwhelmed by possibility and impossibility.
Behind me, I hear Ky’s voice. I stop and listen.
My birthday began with the water—
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
I begin walking again, not bothering with cairns or cloths or anything that might slow me down. I’m careless and I disturb a group of birds, which flutters up and away from us into the sky. White on blue, like the colors of City Hall. Like the colors of angels.
“They’re flying your name,” Ky says from behind me.
I turn around and I see him standing in the forest, the white poem in his hand.
The birds’ cries fly away on the air with them. In the quiet that follows I don’t know who moves first, Ky or me, but soon there we are, standing close but not touching, breathing in but not kissing.
Ky leans toward me, his eyes holding mine, near enough that I can hear the slight crackle of the poem as he moves.
I close my eyes as his lips touch warm on my cheek. I think of the cottonwood seeds brushing against me that day on the air train. Soft, light, full of promise.
CHAPTER 24
Ky gives me three gifts for my birthday. A poem, a kiss, and the hopeless, beautiful belief that things might work. When I open my eyes, as I put my hand up to the place on my cheek where his lips touched, I say, “I didn’t give you anything on your birthday, I don’t even know when it is.” And he says, “Don’t worry about that,” and I say, “What can I do?” and he answers, “Let me believe in this, all of this, and you believe it, too.”
And I do.
For one entire day I let his kiss burn on my cheek and into my blood, and I don’t push the memory away. I have kissed and been kissed before. This is different. This, more than my real birthday the day of the Match Banquet, feels like a day to mark time by. This kiss, these words, they feel like beginning.
I let myself imagine futures that can never be, the two of us together. Even when I sort later that day, I keep my mind on the task at hand by pretending each number sorted is a code, a message to Ky that I will keep our secret. I will keep us safe; I won’t reveal a thing. Each sort I perform correctly keeps attention away from us.
Since it is not my turn for the sleep tags that night, I let my dreams take me where they will. To my surprise, I don’t dream of Ky on the Hill. I dream of him sitting on the steps in front of my house, watching the wind shuffle the leaves of the maple tree. I dream of him taking me to the private dining hall and pulling my chair out, bending so close to me that even the pretend candles flutter at his presence. I dream of the two of us digging up the newroses in his yard and of Ky teaching me how to use the artifact. Everything I dream is something simple and plain and everyday.
That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have.
“How?” I ask him the next day on
the Hill, once we are deep enough into the forest that no one can hear us. “How can we believe this might work? The Official threatened to send you back to the Outer Provinces, Ky!”
Ky doesn’t answer for a moment, and I feel as though I’ve yelled when really I kept my voice as low as possible. Then we walk past the cairn from our last hike and he looks straight at me and I swear I feel that kiss again. But this time, I feel it on my lips instead.
“Have you ever heard of the prisoner’s dilemma?” Ky asks me.
“Of course.” Is he teasing me? “It’s the game you played against Xander. We’ve all played it before.”
“No, not the game. The Society changed the game. I mean the theory behind the game.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. “I guess not.”
“If two people commit a crime together, are caught, and then separated and interrogated, what happens?”
I am still lost. “I don’t know. What?”
“That’s their dilemma. Do they tell on each other in hopes that the Officials will go easy on them—a plea bargain? Do they refuse to say anything that would betray their partner? The best scenario is for both to say nothing. Then they can both be safe.”
We’ve stopped near a group of fallen trees. “Safe,” I say.
Ky nods. “But that never happens.”
“Why not?”
“Because one prisoner will almost always betray the other. They’ll tell what they know to get a break.”
I think I know what he’s asking me. I’m getting better at reading his eyes, at knowing his thoughts. Perhaps it comes from knowing his story, from finally knowing more of him. I hand him a red cloth; neither of us try anymore not to let our fingers touch, come together, cling before letting go.
Ky continues. “But in the perfect scenario, neither would say anything.”
“And you think we can do that?”