“One,” he says. “Two. Three.”
We run, hard, and the ground falls away, and then we are the ones falling, soaring, and I catch a glimpse of the sparkling canyon, the misty pool below, the spray of the waterfall, three moons cresting the peak of a mountain. Then it all drops away, the air whistling by, consumed by the smack and roar of water in my ears.
I kick to the surface, and it’s a long way to break up and into the mist. I suck in the moist air, laugh. I lost Gray’s hand somewhere along the way and I tread water, circling for him in the fog. I hear a tremendous splash. A yell that for one second I think is pain and the next I know isn’t. Gray yells again, echoing all over the canyon. I swim toward the noise and then I find him, floating on his back, still shouting.
“I’m thinking maybe you enjoyed that,” I pant.
“You!” he says. He sends a wall of water at me. “You didn’t tell me it was warm!”
I laugh, avoid another splash. The waterfall is cold, the air is cold, but the pool isn’t. Gray sighs. “We’ll never get out now.”
“We’re going to freeze,” I say happily. “But it’s warmer the deeper you go.”
“Really?” He starts to swim in my direction, and I sense danger, like maybe I’m about to explore the warmer depths. I lift a hand.
“Oh, no. This is not the men’s baths. We don’t appreciate that sort of behavior on the women’s side.”
“That’s not how I pictured it.” He keeps swimming at me, curls plastered down, an evil glint in his eye.
“Do not! It’s too hard to swim with all this on!”
He’s skimming through the water. “I took off mine.”
“Shut up!” I laugh. He attacks me anyway, and I splash him, but he doesn’t even make me go under. After a minute, it’s just an excuse to hold me. I let him do that, too. The water is buoyant; it wants to lift us, topple us. We settle in with Gray half floating, arms wide and head tipped back, eyelashes a smudge against his face, me above and hanging on with my legs. My body beneath the water is pleasantly warm, my body above the surface shivering. My hair is absolutely everywhere.
“Do I have paint smeared all over my face?”
He opens his eyes, smiles the tiniest bit, touches the water rolling down my cheek. “No,” he says. “You are the single most beautiful thing I have ever looked at in my life.”
I have no idea how to kiss someone. I lean down, and very gently touch my lips to his. I don’t want to drown him. He is floating so still now, eyes closed, bobbing just a little in the waves from the waterfall. I bring one of my hands out of the water, put my palm on his chest like I did before, run my hand over the skin that is now water-slicked, up to his neck, thumb across his jaw to the back of his head. I hear his intake of breath. I lean down again, put my mouth on his.
This time he brings an arm up to hold me there, goes more vertical in the water while he pulls me in. I may not know how to kiss someone, but Gray does. His lips are soft and his mouth is warm, one hand keeping us afloat, the other twisted into my hair. I didn’t know I could feel so sought after. Needed. He tugs on my hair to tilt up my chin, kisses my neck down to where the water meets my shoulder. I cradle his face and he kisses my mouth again, soft and then hard, and I hold his head, do not let him stop. I’m not sure that we can stop until he breaks from my lips and puts his forehead on mine. We breathe each other’s air.
“Did that just happen to me?” he whispers.
“I think it did.” It’s me I can’t believe it just happened to.
“Come here,” he says, pulling me with him, slowly swimming me to one side. I feel the cold spray of the waterfall, and then the broken rocks and boulders that ring the pool appear suddenly from the mist. He finds a ledge where we can sit and still be mostly covered in the warmth of the water. It’s darker here, more sheltered from the lit canyon. I go under and come back up, to slick back my hair, and he pulls me to him again.
Now he’s playing, but it’s expert play, like he did with the glass, touching my face, kissing my cheeks and my ears, and he lets me do the same. I can’t believe he reacts to my touch, but he does. He revels in it.
“You know we can never actually leave,” Gray breathes in my ear. “We’ll die of exposure. It’s a shame, but I think we’ll have to stay in here forever.”
“Forever?”
He’s kissing my throat around the piece of blue glass. “We’ll adapt.”
I laugh, mostly because he’s tickling me with his mouth on purpose, but then he’s not tickling me anymore. I put my hands in his wet hair. This is bliss, and I know I’m like a child who has never had something sweet. One taste, and I crave more. Like sweetness might never happen again. I hold him tighter, tilting back my head, and then I see something, in the scraggly vines and bushes growing among the rocks. I pause.
“What is it?” Gray asks.
There’s a round light on the side of one of the rocks, just out of my reach, a dot, small, like an insect glowing. Except it’s the wrong color for an insect. Green. Gray gets more upright in the water, looking at the same place I am. I plant my hands on the rocks and push myself up and out, into an unpleasant blast of cold.
“Oh,” he says. “I really can’t believe you just did that.”
I pad over to the rock, shivering and dripping, reach out a finger to the point of green light. Then the light is on my finger and I gasp, jerking it away, thinking a bug has jumped on me. But it’s only light, except light that’s not like flame or glowworms, or anything else I’ve ever seen. The green dot shines on the rock again. I touch again, and the light is back on my finger. A beam of light.
I hear Gray splashing out of the water, cursing cheerfully as the air hits his body. I open my hand and let the green beam of light hit my palm. I’m shivering, but I’ve forgotten to feel cold. It’s fear I’m feeling now. This light on my hand is not normal. Not natural. And it’s coming from nowhere.
Except that everything comes from somewhere.
When I was a child, wanting to know the truth was called curiosity.
Now that I am grown, the truth I want to know is called a crime.
NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER
BOOK 15, PAGE 81, 1 SEASON UNTIL THE FORGETTING
It’s a beam of light,” I say, when I hear Gray behind me.
“What kind of light?”
Like cracking the door of a lit room when your hallway is dark, I think. I back away and let Gray touch it. The light makes me think of going to the dye houses, when the dyers mix different colors together, find shades that don’t grow that way on their own. This green is deep and weirdly bright. Unnatural. It gives me a strange feeling. Repulsed, though I don’t know why.
Gray straightens and shakes the water from his hair, looking around us. Searching for the source. We’re in a shadowed strip of land between the cliff face and the pool, full of tumbled stone. I crouch, open my hand, and let the green light touch my palm. Then I start walking, toes first in the dark. Gray comes behind me. When I veer off course the light disappears from my hand. I stop until I find it, then move forward again.
“Watch out,” he says.
We’ve come to a thicket of young fern trees, and the light seems to be beaming out from between them. Gray parts the stalks, letting me slide through, stepping in after me, and then looming up in front of us is the cliff face, and I don’t have to crouch anymore. We’re deep in shadow here, the light still on my hand. I bring my hand closer and closer to the rock. And then I stop. The light is coming out of the cliff. That is impossible.
Gray goes to the rock face, running his hands over the source of the light. “This isn’t rock,” he says.
“What isn’t?”
“What I’m touching. Feel.”
I put my hands where his are. Instead of cool stone I feel an area about the size of my hand that is warmer, smoother, not gritty. I trace my fingers around a tiny crack that is the change between rock and what isn’t, where the light is coming out, a place near the
bottom center. There is a bump, a bump that pushes in when my finger runs across it.
A short scream I didn’t know was coming jumps from my mouth, and Gray jerks me back half into the ferns, like I’ve been attacked. The place that isn’t rock is sliding open, on its own, alive and whirring like a hissing beetle. The light brightens, showing me Gray’s face in livid green, and then the movement stops. Now there’s an opening in the rock about the size of my hand, ten squares glowing inside, each with a number silhouetted black against the light. Zero through nine.
I can feel Gray’s breath coming fast beside me. I don’t understand what I just saw. I don’t understand what I’m seeing right now. Nothing else happens, except that everything has happened. Gray gradually relaxes his grip on my arm. He approaches the shining numbers, squats down to look without touching.
“Someone made this,” he says. “They had to. There’s a flame inside, shining through something green … like green glass … ” Then he stiffens. “There are words.”
I come to stand behind him. Above the numbers, where there had been only black, there are now words in red, a red that is somehow deep and bright just like the green. Words made of light. That no one could have written. They say “Enter Code.” I step forward.
“Don’t touch it,” Gray whispers.
I touch it anyway. The surface above the words is completely smooth, polished. The fire is on the inside, but it burns very steady, and it’s not hot. But Gray is right. None of this is natural. Therefore it had to be made. By people. People from beyond the walls. “Do you think … The ones who came first, the ones who built the city … ”
Gray shakes his head. “I don’t know. This is nothing like the city. I mean, Canaan is huge; it would take all of us years and years to build it, even if we could find the stone. But we could do it. We might not know exactly how to shape it the way it’s shaped, but have you ever seen what Jin used to carve out of fern stalks? It’s not impossible. The whole city is something we could do, it’s just so much more than anything we do now, it’s hard to think of it. But this … ”
I understand what he’s saying. I can imagine someone carving blowing wheat from stone. What I’m seeing here is beyond imagination.
“Enter,” Gray says. “Enter. So is there a door?”
He starts feeling all over the rock face again, still dripping, a tall shadow in a green-and-black dark. A door, I think. But to where? To inside the mountain? Gray stops and looks over his shoulder. “They’re not attached.”
“What isn’t?”
“These rocks. They’re not part of the cliff.” He knocks one down, sending it rolling off into the thicket of fern stalks. “They’re just piled up.”
He sends another down, and now I’m helping him, dismantling a sloping pile of stones that had looked like just another part of the canyon walls in the dark. In the light they must have looked that way, too, especially with the fern trees in front of them. I’ve been in that pool at least six times and never noticed. Gray stops about two-thirds of the way down, stepping over the remaining rocks into a space beyond them. There’s a hole in the cliff face. A fissure. Like a cave. I can just make out that he’s reaching up, high over his head, squatting low and to either side, exploring by feel.
“Metal,” he says.
“Is it a door?”
“I don’t know. It’s door-shaped, but it would be a big one. I can’t find a latch. It’s more like a wall.”
A wall of metal in the cliff. But why put it there? Unless you were protecting something inside? And why protect something inside if you never wanted to get that thing out again? There must be a way in.
I step back over the rocks we’ve tumbled and toward the green lights. “They’re gone,” I say. Gray sticks his head out of the cave opening. “The lights and the numbers. It just … shut. By itself.”
Probably while we were tumbling stones. And then I think of what Gray said about a fire inside, shining through glass. Someone has to light a fire. Tend it. Are there people in the mountain? Did someone shut that little door from the inside? I shiver again. Not from cold.
Gray comes to look at where the word lights had been. “What did you do the first time, when it opened?”
“I pushed something.”
“Show me.”
I take his hand, and together we find the smooth place. His hand stays with mine while I feel for the edges and find the bump. “Here.”
“I feel it.”
He must push it, because I jump at the whirring noise again, and there are the green lights and the numbers, no red words this time. This is so unthinkable. And yet it is. I run my fingers over the numbers themselves and jump again, this time at a noise. A note of music, a single blast, sudden, loud, and gone, and, like the lights and the little door opening by itself, completely unnatural. Wrong.
“Will you stop touching things?” Gray breathes, but I’m looking at the black space where the words had been. Now there is a green number 1. Gray sees it, too. I touch the 3. The sound comes again. A number 3 appears in green light.
“Let me try.” Gray reaches around and pushes the 4, 5, and 6, all the way to 9. I push the 2 for good measure, and the 0. The numbers appear in a line. He pushes more, and when the numbers reach the end of their space, they disappear. Like a flashfly, red light suddenly spells “Invalid.” Then flashes right back to “Enter Code.”
Enter code, I think. Enter code. They use code at the Archives, and at the granary, for the rations. “What if it’s not ‘enter,’ like ‘go inside,’ ” I say. “But ‘put in.’ What if it means put in a code?”
Gray doesn’t answer. He’s gone very still behind me. Then he turns on his bare heel and walks out of the fern thicket, back to the edge of the pool, and stands there, hands on the back of his head, staring at the thunder and mist of the waterfall. He’s thinking. And I think he’s upset. The moons are rising in triangle formation over the mountain, and I can see the tension in his back in the silvery light. He is something unreal in that light, shirtless, bookless, wet hair curling against his shoulders. When the moonlight reaches the cliff wall, I wonder if I would have seen that green glow at all.
“Nadia,” he says, “I need you to tell me the truth. Right now. It’s important. Where did you get that piece of metal?”
My hand strays up to the necklace, the metal bracelet hanging behind it. He sounds afraid, but of the wrong things.
“Did your mother give it to you?”
“No.”
“Then where did it come from?”
The little door whirs as it closes. It makes me feel like someone is here, listening. The green light is gone, except for the dot on the rock. “It came from a book,” I say.
“What book?”
“My first one. The one I thought Anson had destroyed. I found it … ” I pull out the metal from beneath my bunched and dripping tunic. The numbers, I think, scratched on the back. Code. But how could those numbers be this code? And why would they be in my book? Then again. Why not? So far, nothing has been the way I’d thought it would be.
Gray turns back, sits on the rock where the green dot of light shines. “Where is that book now?”
“Top of the waterfall.” His gaze darts up. “I stole it from the Archives.”
He puts his head in hands. I think he’s actually laughing. “Of course you did, Dyer’s daughter.”
But I’m wondering how Gray thought of those numbers as code. Because they’re on something else we don’t know how to make? But he’d wanted me to hide the metal bracelet before the festival; he’d hooked it onto the necklace himself. He knows something. Something he hasn’t told me.
“You’re shivering,” Gray says. It’s true. “You should strip down and wring those clothes out so they can dry.” And without even taking the obvious opportunity to suggest that he could wait while I do, he gets up and picks his way carefully in bare feet down the rocky edge of the pool. Now I know he’s worried.
When I can’t see him
anymore, I step back into the dark shelter beside the young ferns, pull the end of the white tunic out of its collar and tug it over my head. Water splashes my feet as I wring it out. I shake it, hang it up on a fern, leave on the leggings—they’re so tight to my body they’re not holding much extra anyway—and lean over to twist my hair, squeezing the water downward until it runs onto the ground. There are still pins in there, I think, and maybe strips of blue cloth. What I’m really trying to do is not think about someone being inside the mountain behind me. And thinking of that is helping me to ignore the sprouting seed of doubt about what Gray hasn’t told me. I never did ask him why he wanted to go over the wall.
I’m wringing out the lower end of my shirt for a second time when I hear a faint rustling in the ferns. From the direction Gray went. I yank the tunic back over my head. The rustling comes nearer, fast, and Gray emerges from the dark and instantly puts a hand over my mouth. He shakes his head once, telling me very clearly not to speak, grabs my arm, and pushes me back behind the fern thicket, over the tumbled stones, inside the opening in the cliff. There are more rocks left piled on one side than the other, and Gray pulls me behind them, presses me up against the cave wall, one finger against my mouth.
A rock falls somewhere near the pool, a big one, three sharp clanks of stone against stone before it settles. He leans down.
“Someone is here,” he breathes in my ear.
I can feel his heart again, pounding inside his bare chest, my own racing to match it. Whatever Gray suspects, whatever he hasn’t told me, he’s afraid for me. I can feel that. I pull out my doubt like a weed. The waterfall rushes, and there’s nothing but the quiet of being outside the walls. And then I hear footsteps crunching in the smaller rocks along the edge of the pool.
I put my hands on Gray’s shoulders, catch his eye, and push, showing him I want us to crouch behind what’s left of the rocks. We sink downward together. I kneel in the dirt, wince when I put my knee on a pebble, and get one eye between two stones in the pile, Gray somewhere just behind me.
The Forgetting Page 16
