by Ally Condie
I have to try, even though I don’t think this tired gray man has any answers for me and the hope I had seems to be slipping away. “I want to know more about the Glorious History of Tana Province.”
A pause. A beat.
The man draws in a breath and begins to speak. “Tana Province has beautiful geography and is also renowned for its farming,” he says, his voice flat.
He doesn’t know. My heart sinks. Back in Oria, Ky told me that the poems Grandfather gave me could be valuable, and also that asking the history of the Province was a way to let the Archivists know you wanted to trade. I’d hoped it would be the same way here. It was stupid of me. Perhaps there are no Archivists in Tana at all, and if there were, they must have better places to be than waiting for closing time in this sad little museum.
The man continues. “Floods sometimes occurred in Tana pre-Society, but that has been controlled for many years now. We are one of the most productive farming Provinces in the Society.”
I don’t look back at Xander. Or the Official. Just at the map in front of me. I tried to trade before and it didn’t work then either. But the first time it was because I couldn’t bring myself to give away the poem Ky and I shared.
Then I notice that the man has stopped speaking. He looks at me directly. “Is there anything else?” he asks.
I should give up. Should smile and turn away to Xander and forget about this, accept that the man knows nothing and move on. But for some reason I think suddenly of one of those last red leaves holding on against the sky. I breathe. It falls.
“Yes,” I say softly.
Grandfather gave me two poems. Ky and I loved the Thomas one, but there were other words, too, and those are the ones that come to me now. I don’t remember all of it, that poem by Tennyson, but one stanza comes back to me clear in my mind as though it were written there all along. Perhaps it was the man’s mention of flooding that brought it back:
“For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.”
As I speak the words quietly, the man’s face changes. He becomes clever, alert, alive. I must have remembered correctly. “That’s an interesting poem,” he says. “Not, I think, one of the Hundred.”
“No,” I say. My hands tremble and I dare to hope again. “But still worth something.”
“I’m afraid not,” he says. “Unless you have the original.”
“No,” I say. “It was destroyed.” I destroyed it. I remember that moment at the Restoration site and how the paper fluttered up before it went down to burn.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds as though he is. “What is it you were hoping to trade for?” he asks, a hint of curiosity in his voice.
I point to the Outer Provinces. If I can just get to them, there’s a slim but real chance I can find Ky. “I know they’re taking the Aberrations there,” I say softly. “But I want to know exactly where and how I can get there. A map.”
He shakes his head at me. No.
He can’t tell me? Or he won’t? “I have something else,” I say.
I angle my back so that neither Xander nor the Official can see my hands; I reach into the bag. My fingers brush the foil of the tablets and the hard surface of the compass at the same time and I stop.
Which should I trade?
Suddenly I’m dizzy, confused, remembering the time I had to sort Ky. The steam in the room, the sweat, the ache of the decision pressing against me. .
Stay clear, I tell myself. I glance over my shoulder at Xander and meet the blue of his eyes for one brief moment before he turns back to the Official. I remember Ky looking down at me from the air-train platform before they took him away and feel again the panic of time running out.
I make up my mind and reach into the bag, pulling out the item for trade. I hold it up just high enough for the man to see, trying to keep my hands from shaking and attempting to convince myself that I can give this up.
He smiles and nods at me. “Yes,” he says. “That is worth something. But what you want would take days — weeks — to arrange.”
“I only have tonight,” I say.
Before I can say anything more, the man takes the offering and leaves my hand empty. “Where are you going next?”
“The music hall,” I say.
“Check under your seat when you leave,” he whispers. “I will do the best I can.” Above us, the lights dim. His eyes do, too, and then, in the flat voice he first used he tells me, “We’re closing. You all need to go.”
Xander leans over during the music. “Did you get what you needed?” he asks, his voice deep and low and his breath brushing my neck. On his other side, the Official stares ahead. He taps his fingers on the armrest of his chair, keeping time to the music.
“I don’t know yet,” I tell him. The Archivist said to look under my seat when I left, not before, but I am still tempted to try earlier. “Thank you for helping me.”
“It’s what I do,” Xander says.
“I know it is,” I say. I remember the gifts he gave me: the painting, the blue tablets neatly rowed in their compartments. Even the compass, I realize, my gift from Ky, was something Xander saved for me once, on that day back in the Borough when they took the artifacts.
“But you don’t know everything about me,” Xander says. A mischievous grin crosses his face.
I glance down at his hand around mine, his thumb brushing across my skin, and then I look back up into his eyes. Though he still smiles there’s something serious about his expression now. “No,” I agree. “I don’t.”
We hold on to each other. The Society’s music plays around and over us, but our thoughts are always our own.
When I stand up, I brush my hand underneath the chair. Something’s there — a folded square of paper — and it comes away easily when I tug on it. Though I want to look now, I slip it into my pocket instead, wondering what I have, what I’ve traded for.
The Official walks us back to the main hall of the camp. When we go inside, he glances around the hall, at the long tables and the single hulking port, and when he looks back at me there’s an expression in his eyes that I think might be pity. I lift my chin.
“You have ten minutes to say good-bye,” the Official tells us. His voice, now that we are back in the camp, sounds sharper than it did before. He pulls out his datapod and nods to the Officer waiting to take me back to my cabin.
Xander and I both take a deep breath at the same time and then we laugh together. I like the sound of it, our laughter echoing around the almost empty hall. “What was he looking at for so long?” I ask Xander, nodding toward the Official.
“A display on the history of Matching,” Xander says quietly. He looks at me as though there’s some meaning there I should understand, but I don’t. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the Official.
“Nine minutes,” he says without looking up.
“I still can’t believe they let you come,” I tell Xander. “I’m so glad they did.”
“The timing was optimal,” Xander says. “I’m leaving Oria. I’m only passing through Tana on my way to Camas Province.”
“What?” I blink in surprise. Camas is one of the Border Provinces, right along the edge of the Outer Provinces. I feel strangely untethered. Much as I love looking at the stars, I never learned to guide by them. I mark my course by people: Xander, a point on the map; my parents, another point; Ky, the final destination. When Xander moves, the geography of everything changes.
“I have my final work position,” Xander says. “It’s in Central. Like yours. But they want me to have experience in the Border Provinces first.”
“Why?” I ask him softly.
Xander’s tone is sober. “There are things I need to learn there for my work assignment that I can’t learn anywhere else.”
“And then to Central,” I say. The idea of Xander in Central feels ri
ght and final. Of course he would belong in the capital of the Society. Of course they would see his potential and bring him there. “You’re really leaving.”
An expression of what looks like anger flashes momentarily across his face. “Do you have any idea what it’s like being left?”
“Of course I do,” I say, stung.
“No,” he says. “Not the way Ky left you. He didn’t want to go. Do you know what it’s like for someone to choose to leave you?”
“I didn’t choose to leave you behind. We were Relocated.”
Xander exhales. “You still don’t understand,” he says. “You left me before you left Oria.” He glances over at the Official and then back at me, his blue eyes serious. He’s changed, since I’ve seen him, become harder. More careful.
More like Ky.
I know what he means now about my leaving. For Xander, I began to leave when I chose Ky.
Xander looks down at our hands, still clasped together.
My gaze follows his. His hand is strong, the knuckles rough. He can’t write with his hands, but they are quick and sure over the cards and in the games. This physical contact, though not with Ky, is still with someone I love. I hold on as if I won’t ever let go, and part of me doesn’t want to.
The air in the main hall feels cool and I shiver. Would you call this season late fall? Early winter? I can’t tell. The Society, with their extra crops, has blurred the line between seasons, between when you can plant and harvest and when you must let things lie. Xander takes his hands away and leans forward, looking at me deep. I catch myself gazing at his mouth, remembering our kiss back in the Borough, that sweet innocent kiss before everything changed. I think Xander and I would kiss differently now.
In a whisper that brushes along my collarbone, Xander asks, “Are you still going to the Outer Provinces to find him?”
“ Yes,” I whisper.
The Official calls out the time. Only a few minutes left. Xander forces a smile, tries to speak lightly. “You really want this? You want Ky, whatever the cost?” I can almost imagine the words the Official taps into the datapod as he watches us now: Female Matchee expressed some agitation, soon after the male Matchee told her about his field assignment in Camas. Male was able to console her.
“No,” I say. “Not at any cost.”
Xander draws in his breath sharply. “So where do you draw the line? What won’t you give up?”
I swallow. “My family.”
“But you don’t mind giving me up,” he says. His jaw tightens and he looks away. Look back, I think. Don’t you know that I love you, too? That you have been my friend for years? That I still feel Matched to you in some ways?
“I’m not,” I say softly. “I’m not giving you up. Look.” And then I risk it. I pull open the bag and show him what’s still inside, what I kept. The blue tablets. Though he gave them to me to find Ky, they are still Xander’s gift.
Xander’s eyes widen. “You traded Ky’s compass?”
“Yes,” I say.
Xander smiles and in the expression I see surprise and cunning and happiness all mingled there together. I’ve surprised Xander — and myself. I love Xander in ways that are perhaps more complicated than I first expected.
But it’s Ky I have to find.
“It’s time,” the Official calls. The Officer looks in my direction.
“Good-bye,” I tell Xander, my voice catching.
“I don’t think so,” he says, and he leans down to kiss me the way I kissed him earlier, right near my mouth. If either of us moved a little, everything would change.
CHAPTER 5
KY
Vick and I lift one of the bodies and carry it toward a grave. I recite the words I say over all of the dead now:
“For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.”
I don’t see how there can be more than this. How anything from these bodies can last when they die so easily and decay so fast. Still, part of me wants to believe that the flood of death carries us someplace after all. That there’s someone to see at the end. That’s the part of me that says the words over the dead when I know they don’t hear a thing I say.
“Why do you say that every time?” Vick asks me.
“I like the sound.”
Vick waits. He wants me to speak more but I won’t. “You know what it means?” he asks, finally.
“It’s about someone hoping for more,” I tell him noncommittally. “It’s part of a poem from before the Society.” Not from the poem that belongs to Cassia and me. I won’t speak those words to anyone again until I can tell them to her. The poem I say now is the other one she found in her artifact when she opened it that day in the woods.
She didn’t know I was there. I stood, watching her read the paper. I saw her lips forming the words of a poem I didn’t know, and then of one I did. When I realized what she was saying about the Pilot, I stepped forward and a stick snapped under my foot.
“Doesn’t do them any good,” Vick tells me, gesturing to one of the bodies and then shoving his sandy hair back from his face in irritation. They won’t give us scissors or razors for cutting our hair or shaving — too easy to turn into weapons to kill each other or ourselves. It doesn’t usually matter. Only Vick and I have been out here long enough to have hair that falls into our eyes. “So that’s all it is? Some old poem?”
I shrug.
It’s a mistake.
Usually, Vick doesn’t care when I don’t answer him, but this time I see a challenge in his eyes. I start planning the best way to take him down. The increase in firings has affected him, too. Put him on edge. He’s bigger than me but not by much, and I learned to fight out here years ago. Now that I am back I remember it, like the snow on the plateau. My muscles tense.
But Vick stops. “You never cut notches in your boot,” he says, his voice back to even and his eyes back to calm.
“No,” I agree.
“Why?”
“No one needs to know,” I say.
“To know what? How long you’ve lasted?” Vick asks.
“To know anything about me,” I say.
We leave the graves behind and take a break for lunch, sitting on a group of sandstone boulders outside of the village. The colors are the red orange brown of my childhood, and their texture is the same: dry and rough and — in November — cold.
I use the narrow end of the decoy gun to scratch a mark into the sandstone. I don’t want anyone to know I can write, so I don’t write her name.
Instead I draw a curve. A wave. Like an ocean, or a piece of green silk rolling in the wind.
Scratch, scratch. The sandstone, shaped by other forces, water and wind, is now altered by me. Which I like. I always carve myself into what others want me to be. With Cassia on the Hill — only then was I truly myself.
I’m not ready yet to draw her face. I don’t even know if I can. But I scratch another curve into the rock. It looks a little like the C I first taught her to write. I make the curve again, remembering her hand.
Vick leans over to see what I’m doing. “That doesn’t look like anything.”
“It looks like the moon,” I tell him. “When it’s thin.”
Vick glances up at the plateau. Earlier today some air ships came for the bodies. That hasn’t happened before. I don’t know what the Society has done with them, but I wish I’d thought to climb up to the top and write something to mark the decoys’ passing.
Because now there is nothing to say that they were ever there. The snow melted before they could make a footprint in it. Their lives ended before they even knew what they could be.
“You think that boy was lucky?” I ask Vick. “The one who died in camp, before we came to the villages?”
“Lucky,” Vick says, as if he doesn’t know what the word means. And maybe he doesn’t. Luck is not a word the Society encourages
. And it’s not something we have much of out here.
There was a firing our first night out in the villages. We all started running to take cover. A few of the boys ran out into the street with their guns and shot at the sky. Vick and I ended up in the same house with one or two others. I don’t remember their names. They’re gone now.
“Why aren’t you out there trying to shoot back?” Vick asked me then. We hadn’t talked to each other much since we put the boy in the river.
“No reason to,” I said. “The ammunition isn’t real.” I put my standard-issue gun on the ground next to me.
Vick puts his gun down, too. “How long have you known?”
“Since they gave them to us on our way here,” I said. “What about you?”
“The same,” Vick answered. “We should have told the others.”
“I know,” I said. “I was stupid. I thought we’d have a little more time.”
“Time,” Vick said, “is what we don’t have.”
The world shattered outside and someone else started screaming.
“I wish I had a gun that worked,” Vick said. “I’d blow everyone on those air ships away. Pieces of them would come down like fireworks.”
“Finished,” Vick says now, folding up his foilware into a sharp silver square. “We’d better get back to work.”
“I wonder why they don’t just give us blue tablets,” I say. “Then they wouldn’t have to bother with our meals.”
Vick looks at me as if I’m crazy. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?” I ask.
“The blue tablets don’t save you. They stop you. If you take one, you’ll slow down and stay where you are until someone finds you or you die waiting. Two will finish you outright.”
