“It’s because they know it’s coming,” I whisper. “They know that everything they are is about to disappear. That everyone who loves them won’t remember they love them, and that they won’t remember that love, either. It’s like the end. Like death.
“So some lock themselves in with their families. Others … it’s more like the festival, only … twisted. It’s almost like they … celebrate. Do whatever they want. Whatever they’ve been denied. I heard screaming, and there were people … and they were laughing at the one who screamed. I saw two men breaking windows, taking bread and stores through the missing glass, and a girl being dragged out of her house. She was bloody, and she didn’t have her book, and there were buildings on fire. I saw … a woman … laying a baby in the street … ” I’m shaking, but only a little. Gray has pulled my face into his chest, his hand on the back of my neck, like before. Like a tether to the present. “… it was still in its blankets, and there was a row of three children, and later, when I remembered, I knew … they were dead, and I don’t understand why—”
“Enough,” Gray says. “That’s enough.”
I can hear his voice in his chest. And I can feel that he’s angry. Angry because of my words and, I think, because we can’t do anything about it.
“It didn’t exactly turn out like they’d planned, did it?” he says. “Their new civilization … ”
I think of the hope I saw on the faces in those images, Janis’s smiling little-girl face. Gray’s grip on me tightens.
“So we come in here. When it’s time for the Forgetting. We bring food and we stay until it’s over.”
I lean back to look at him. “And when is it safe to come out? We can’t stay in here forever.”
He closes his eyes. Doesn’t answer.
“And what about your parents? What about my—”
“Listen to me.” He opens his eyes, and he is intent, so still he might explode. “You listen to me. I do not want to forget you. Do you understand?”
All this time I’ve been fearing the moment that Gray would forget me. What I hadn’t realized was how much he was fearing it, too.
“Then don’t forget me,” I say.
His mouth is on mine before I know what’s happened, like he’s trying to imprint the memory of it there. My hands find his stomach, the skin of his back, and then I am undoing his bookstrap and he is untying my tether and kicking my pack away across the floor, pulling me to him until we stagger through a door and my back hits the mattress. I am pinned, pressed, covered, and he is wild and beautiful and I twist my hands into his hair so he can’t get away. I want time to stop, to freeze like an image on the wall. His lips brush my shoulder, my collarbone.
“Gray,” I breathe.
He kisses my mouth again, stopping my words.
“Gray,” I say again.
He doesn’t loosen his hold, but this time his forehead drops to the mattress beside my head. “I know,” he whispers. “I know.” He breathes in and out, our bodies tight together. He sighs again. “I don’t even like babies.”
It takes a beat before I laugh. Leave it to the glassblower’s son to make me laugh at a moment like this. He laughs, too, against my neck while I stroke his hair. “You’re terrible,” I tell him, which is to say, wonderful. He rolls to the side and I roll with him, propping up my head on a hand. His hair is tangled, eyelashes a smear of dark brown like the stubble on his chin, and I wonder how he can exist. Our time is so short. He runs a hand down the curve of my side.
“Write me down,” he says. He’s not looking at my face, he’s looking at his exploring hand. “Write me down,” he says again. “So that when I forget, I can see it.”
I roll away, get up from the mattress, and leave the little resting room. I sit next to my half-open pack on the floor, get out my book and my pen and ink. On the next blank page I write the sentence “I choose Gray, Glassblower’s son.”
While my pen is scratching I hear Gray coming, feel him sit against my back, watching me finish. He picks up his own book from the floor and opens it, flipping to find his page, sets it in my lap. It says “I choose Nadia, Dyer’s daughter.”
“When did you write that?”
“After you came to my house and told me you loved plants.” He puts his arms around me, chin on my shoulder. I lift his right arm, lay my head on the scars from the last Forgetting.
“If you forget me,” I say, “then I will remember for us. Okay?”
I hear him breathe long in the quiet. “Okay.”
I leave the bracelet on the table and put the First Book back in my pack. I want to study that list of one hundred and fifty. The book would be safer here, but it’s occurred to me that’s the same number as the original “best of the best” chosen for Canaan, maybe even seventy-five men, seventy-five women. And I can always put it in my hiding hole. I wish I had a hiding hole big enough for Mother. If I could get Mother into the Archives, I could maybe get her out and under the wall, and I’m not sure Genivee doesn’t need to come, too. With the history of our family, it’s possible that Genivee might not forget, and if that’s so, I don’t want her anywhere near the city before the Forgetting. I’m talking to Liliya about it as soon as I get home.
Gray straps on his book, and we walk hand in hand down the rock passage, quiet. He has chosen me. I have chosen him. I never thought I would choose. I never thought I would be chosen. And when he forgets me, if he forgets me, I just have to make sure he chooses me again.
We stand for a few seconds in front of the door. Gray kisses my held hand before he presses down on the glowing red glass. The door whirs, clanks, and I hear the rain, a soft constant swish melding with the roar of the waterfall, the smell of dark day flowers spicy in the air. I follow Gray through the door into the cave opening, feel him freeze before I realize what’s wrong.
There, just in front of the clump of young ferns, sitting quietly on a rock in the rain, is Janis.
“Children,” she says. “What have you been up to?”
No one could take as many risks as I do and never be caught. I know this. But when my day comes, I will never say I’m sorry. Because I have been taught to say the truth in Canaan.
NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER
BOOK 15, PAGE 54, 1 SEASON UNTIL THE FORGETTING
Gray steps just a little in front of me. I’m still holding his hand, the open doorway behind me, the two of us filling the small space between it and Janis. She is not going through that door.
Janis shakes her head. “Nothing to say?” She sighs and gets up from her perch, straightening out her wet robes. The door behind us begins to shut on its own.
Janis makes a dash toward the door, surprisingly fast, and Gray blocks her. I push her when she tries to get around him, and Gray holds out his other arm. By that time the door is shut and the mountain is locked. I smile.
Janis drops her hands. Looks at Gray. “Open the door.”
“No.”
She looks to me. “And you say the same, I assume.”
I nod.
“Very well. Come with me, then.”
She turns, stepping spryly through the rocks and rain. Like we’re going to follow her. I glance at Gray, and he hasn’t moved. His eyes are narrowed, jaw set. Angry. Janis looks over her shoulder.
“Come. I have guests waiting for you. You need to tell me what to do with them.” She looks back and forth between the two of us. “Delia and Genivee.”
Gray holds my hand, immobile. I look back into Janis’s pitch-dark eyes.
“Or do I need to decide what to do with them?” she asks. “I do have thoughts.”
And that’s it. We come. Janis puts up her hood, to keep out the rain. We are so much faster than her, so much stronger than her, but two names, and she holds us in her hands. My stomach is tensed to the point of pain. Genivee. What would she do to Genivee to make me give her that code? Maybe anything. We all have to get out of the city—Gray’s family, too. Run right over the mountain into whatever is beyond. What w
e do is follow Janis through the rain. How was today my day to be caught? Right now? I’d thought my time would come at the ladder, or in the Archives.
At the cave entrance below the walls, Janis flips back her hood, showing her elegant twist of pure white hair. I stop, pull Gray to a stop beside me.
“I’m not going any farther unless you agree to let Genivee and Delia go when we get there.”
Janis slows, turns to eye me. “Are you familiar with the concept of leverage, Nadia? Genivee is only required to make sure that you and I have a conversation. Nothing more. Once you arrive, of course she will no longer be needed. And the same for Delia,” she adds, glancing at Gray. Gray’s hand tightens on mine, and we exchange a look. As soon as we see my sister, as soon as we see his mother, we have to grab them, and we have to get over the wall. No waiting for conversations. Gray nods just slightly, and we are in agreement. What we’ll do after the Forgetting I can’t imagine. We step into the cave.
Janis knows her path, moves much more easily among the rocks than we did earlier. At the river passage she turns left, away from the Archives, as I thought she might, and we walk a long way in the blue-white glow of the lamps. There are no plants on the walls here, and though this is a natural passage, I think the way has been cleared somewhat, chiseled and smoothed for travel. The last glowworm light ends at another set of steps, these also carved from the rock, and at the top of them is a door, sparkling metal, and then we are in some kind of workspace.
The room is dark but for lamps, oil this time. I think we must still be belowground because there are no windows, and the floor above is supported by a row of posts, fern tree trunks that have hardened, running in rows down the long room, which is open but for the clutter. Dried plants, hanging plants, high tables with bowls and metal tubing, enormous vats, books, insects crawling in jars, a desk with ink and papers, shelves with bottle after bottle of colored liquids, and there’s a faint smell I can’t identify, a smell that burns my nose. This is not what I expected from the extravagant Council House. Gray is still holding my hand, muscles pulled taut like the rope of my ladder. Judging by his expression, he’s never been here.
Janis smiles pleasantly at us, rings a bell just outside a door to a stairwell going up, and then she locks the door to the cave with a key hanging from a ring of keys on a string around her neck.
“Genivee?” I call.
“Patience,” Janis chides.
“Where … ” I start to demand, but Gray suddenly pulls me to one side, toward the door to the stairwell, shoving me toward it.
“Run,” he yells, shielding my escape with his body. “Run!”
I don’t know what’s happening. But before I can even regain my balance, Reese is coming down the stairs, from what must be the main part of the house, Li behind him, and Jonathan of the Council. It takes both Reese and Li to subdue Gray, and only Jonathan to subdue me. Or Jonathan and the knife he holds to my throat, pushing me backward into one of the posts.
I hear the sound of fists hitting skin, Gray choking. The tangle of bodies is on the edge of my vision, but when I turn my head to see even a little the knife stings, and a trickle of blood runs behind my necklace and down to my chest. I keep my eyes on Jonathan. He stares at the blood on my neck, and it makes me think he’d prefer to see that trickle grow bigger. I stay very still.
The scuffle dies down. Gray is being searched now, and when Reese comes to deal with me, Jonathan doesn’t move the knife, just changes his position to behind me. Reese yanks the pack off my back, tossing it to one side. The First Book is in there, now half under one of Janis’s high worktables.
“Search her,” Janis says. “We could be looking for something small.”
He searches me, feeling all over, without any of the restraint he showed at the Archives. Then he pushes my feet back, one on either side, and goes round and round my ankles with rope, tying them to the post, pulling my wrists back and tying them together, too. When Jonathan finally takes the knife from my bleeding neck Gray is just a meter or two away, seated backward on a chair, head hanging over the back of it, his wrists tied to his calves. The glass key, I see, is still around his neck. I wonder if they think it’s decoration, like my necklace.
Reese retrieves my pack and goes through it, tossing it back where it was, a little farther under the table. He doesn’t mention an extra book. He just says, “Nothing.”
Janis sighs. I don’t know where Jonathan is. Somewhere behind me with that knife. I grit my teeth to keep my voice steady.
“Where is Genivee?”
Gray looks up and coughs. His cheek is purpling, swelling, much worse than when Eshan hit him, and there’s a cut on the corner of his eye. But unbelievably, he’s also smirking. He shakes his head. “They’re not here. They never were.” I see when he catches sight of the blood on my neck.
Janis waves her hand toward the stairwell, sending Li and Reese away without a word. Jonathan comes out from behind me, hesitating while they go. “I will entertain our guests,” she says, dismissing him. His eyes meet mine for just a second, and there is no light behind them. None at all. I wonder how often she has guests down here, and how often her grandson stays to see them entertained.
“I spoke to you of leverage,” Janis says. She is shedding her wet robes, beneath them a very plain, practical black tunic reaching almost to her feet. She doesn’t have a book. “I find that most people are more cooperative when their decisions involve someone besides themselves. This is what we will be exploring today.” She hangs her robes on a hook behind the desk. “But please, Nadia, don’t be concerned with my concept of the truth. I can have Delia and Genivee here at a moment’s notice, if I wish, so it hardly matters whether or not they were here already. It’s this one”—she goes to Gray’s head, pulls it up by the hair—“that has issues with truth. You have been lying to me, Glassblower.”
My chest is slamming. It’s hard to breathe against it. I can’t believe we just followed her in here. That we believed her. But how could I run if there was even the slightest possibility that she had Genivee? I’d probably do the same thing again. Gray is stretching his fingers, testing his bonds, and somehow still managing to smirk while his hair is being pulled. “You should have taken me back to the Lost,” he says.
“Indeed.” She drops his head, tsks once, goes to a high table full of bowls and tubing and picks up a bottle of fluid. “There was no reason to think, back then, that you had a place among us.” She glances at me, and adds, “Gray was a terrible test-taker.”
“I was too bored to finish,” he says, a little belligerent. I think I’m supposed to discern from this that Janis sent Gray to the Lost because of his test scores.
“And you were such a troublemaker,” Janis says. “But there was a shortage of labor, and I admit that you made me curious after that. A mistake.”
“Indeed,” he replies, mocking. And there is the Gray I remember from the learning room. These two seem almost comfortable in their loathing for each other.
I wriggle my wrists behind me as Janis lifts something I’ve never seen before, a small tube with what looks like a sewing needle on its end. She draws up fluid through the needle and into the tube from a bottle, and suddenly my anger and fear congeal into panic, deep and basic. We have to get out. I can see no way out. She holds the tube up to the lamp, the sharp end glinting, flicks it once with a finger.
“You should both understand that I’m going to ask you questions, and you might as well answer, because I will make you answer. You’re not going to remember that I asked, or remember that you answered, or that you were here at all. So you can see that there’s no point in being brave or even spiteful. It doesn’t have to take long. Or it can take long. I am very patient.”
I think she must mean the Forgetting, that we’re not going to remember after that, but that’s still fifteen days away. Surely she’s not that patient. Janis smiles at me.
“But I can see you don’t believe me, Nadia. You have a very logical min
d that requires convincing. I’ve noted this about you. Let me explain, so that when it’s time, you will understand exactly why you should be candid with your answers.”
She goes to the high, wide shelf on the other side of me and chooses a bottle. It has white powder inside, dusty and fine. My eyes are on the needle in her other hand.
“This,” she says, holding up the bottle, “is Forgetting. Breathe the tiniest bit, and what happens in this room will be gone from your head. Along with everything else. This is not a terrible loss for you. It was going to happen very soon anyway. But understand that before you leave here, you will forget.”
She thinks she can make us forget. And not just every twelve years. When she wants to. And she’s right, I don’t believe it. Not after getting tricked on the way in here. It also makes me realize that Janis does not realize I can remember. There’s one of Gray’s lies she hasn’t seen through.
“Is it dust from a comet?” Gray says, trying to lift his head. He asked like he was in school, just to irritate her. But I can hear that he’s in pain. His position has to be leaving his back and neck cramped. Janis laughs, as if his answer was wrong, but not quite as wrong as she expected.
“Very good, Glassblower. But no. Not from the comet. These are the live spores of the forgetting tree. Aptly named, don’t you think? The spores are released into the air with the tree’s blooming cycle every twelve years, perfectly timed, or perhaps triggered by, the passing light and radiation of our comet. The spores have three days to find a dark, moist place to replicate. And they do it fast, right before your eyes, which I must say is very intriguing. They’re meant to travel in the wind, or on the backs and wings of insects, but when breathed by humans … they attempt their replicating process in the body, where in most cases they cause an inflammation of the brain that takes away memory. This”—she holds up the little bottle—“could make half the city forget.”
The Forgetting Page 24
