by Ally Condie
“Ky. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry they are gone.”
He doesn’t say anything but bends to tie a red cloth around a particularly thorny shrub. His hands shake a bit. I know what that brief moment of losing control means for someone like Ky and I want to comfort him. I place my hand on his back, gently, softly, just enough so that he knows I am there. As my hand meets the cloth of his shirt he spins around and I pull back when I see the pain in his eyes. His look begs me not to say any more; it is enough that I know. It may be too much.
“Who’s Sisyphus?” I ask, trying to think of something to distract him. “You mentioned his name once. When the Officer told us that we were going to start coming to the Hill.”
“Someone whose story has been told for a long time.” Ky stands up and starts walking again. I can tell that he needs to keep moving today. “It was one of my father’s favorite stories to tell. I think he wanted to be like Sisyphus, because Sisyphus was crafty and sneaky and always causing trouble for the Society and the Officials.”
Ky’s never talked about his father before. Ky’s voice sounds flat; I can’t tell from his tone how he feels about the man who died years ago, the man whose name Ky held in his hand in the picture.
“There’s a story about how Sisyphus once asked an Official to show him how a weapon worked and then he turned it on the Official.”
I must look shocked, but Ky seems to have anticipated my surprise. His eyes are kind as he explains. “It’s an old story, from back when the Officials carried weapons. They don’t use them anymore.”
What he doesn’t say, but what we both know, is They don’t have to. The threat of Reclassification is enough to keep almost everyone in line.
Ky turns back, pushes his way ahead. I watch him move, the muscles in his back inches away from me; I follow close so that I can slip through the branches he holds back for me. The smell of the forest seems, for a moment, to be simply the smell of him. I wonder what sage smells like, the smell he said was his favorite in his old life. I hope that the smell of this forest is his favorite now. I know it is mine.
“The Society decided that they needed to give Sisyphus a punishment, a special one, because he dared to think he could be as clever as one of them, when he wasn’t an Official, or even a citizen. He was nothing. An Aberration from the Outer Provinces.”
“What did they do to him?”
“They gave him a job. He had to roll a rock, a huge one, to the top of a mountain.”
“That doesn’t sound so terrible.” There’s relief in my voice. If the story ends well for Sisyphus, maybe it can end well for Ky.
“It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. As he was about to reach the top, the rock rolled back to the bottom and he had to start again. That happened every time. He never got the rock to the top. He went on pushing forever.”
“I see,” I say, realizing why our hikes on the little hill reminded Ky of Sisyphus. Day after day we did the same thing: climbed back up and came back down. “But we did make it to the top of the little hill.”
“We were never allowed to stay there for long,” Ky points out.
“Was he from your Province?” I stop for a moment, thinking I’ve heard the Officer’s whistle, but it’s merely a shrill birdcall from the canopy of leaves above us.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s real,” Ky says. “If he ever existed.”
“Then why tell his story?” I don’t understand, and for a second I feel betrayed. Why did Ky tell me about this person and make me feel empathy for him when there’s no proof that he ever lived at all?
Ky pauses for a moment before he answers, his eyes wide and deep like the oceans in other tales or like the sky in his own. “Even if he didn’t live his story, enough of us have lived lives just like it. So it’s true anyway.”
I think about what Ky said while we move again, quickly, tying off areas and helping each other around and through the tangled parts of the forest. There’s a smell here that I have smelled before: a smell of decay, but it doesn’t seem rotten. It smells almost rich, the scent of the plants returning to the earth, of wood giving way to dust.
But the Hill could be hiding something. I remember Ky’s words and pictures and I realize that no place is completely good. No place is completely bad. I’ve been thinking in terms of absolutes; first, I believed our Society was perfect. The night they came for our artifacts, I believed it was evil. Now I simply don’t know.
Ky blurs the lines for me. He helps me see clearly, too. And I hope I do the same for him.
“Why do you throw the games?” I ask him as we pause in a small clearing.
His face tightens. “I have to.”
“Every time? Don’t you even let yourself think about winning?”
“I always think about winning,” Ky tells me. There’s fire in his eyes again, and he snaps a branch off a tree to make room for us to go through. He tosses the first branch to the side and holds another one back, waiting for me to pass, but I stay right there next to him. He looks down at me, shadows from the leaves crossing his face, and also sun. He’s looking at my lips, which makes it hard to speak, even though I know what I want to say.
“Xander knows you lose on purpose.”
“I know he does,” Ky says. A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth, like the one I thought I saw last night. “Any other questions?”
“Just one,” I say. “What color are your eyes?” I want to know what he thinks, how he sees himself—the real Ky—when he dares to look.
“Blue,” he says, sounding surprised. “They’ve always been blue.”
“Not to me.”
“What do they look like to you?” he says, puzzled, amused. Not looking at my mouth anymore, looking into my eyes.
“Lots of colors,” I say. “At first, I thought they were brown. Once I thought they were green, and another time gray. They are most often blue, though.”
“What are they now?” he asks. He widens his eyes a little, leans closer, lets me look as long and as deep as I want.
And there’s so much to see. They are blue, and black, and other colors, too, and I know some of what they’ve seen and what I hope they see now. Me. Cassia. What I feel, who I am.
“Well?” Ky asks.
“Everything,” I tell him. “They’re everything.”
Neither of us moves for a moment, locked instead in each other’s eyes and in the branches of this Hill we might never finish climbing. I’m the one who moves first. I step past him and push my way through some more tangled leaves, climb over a small fallen tree.
Behind me I hear Ky doing the same.
I’m falling in love. I am in love. And it’s not with Xander, although I do love him. I’m sure of that, as sure as I am of the fact that what I feel for Ky is something different.
As I tie another red flag on the trees and wish for the fall of our Society and its systems, including the Matching System, so that I can be with Ky, I realize that it is a selfish wish. Even if the fall of our Society would make life better for some, it would make it worse for others. Who am I to try to change things, to get greedy and want more? If our Society changes and things are different, who am I to tell the girl who would have enjoyed the safe protected life that now she has to have choice and danger because of me?
The answer is: I’m not anyone. I’m just one of the people who happened to fall in the majority. All my life, the odds have been on my side.
“Cassia,” Ky says. He snaps another branch off and bends down in a swift movement to write in the thick dirt on the forest floor. He has to push away a layer of leaves and a spider hurries away. “Look,” he says, showing me another letter. K.
Thankful for the distraction, I crouch down beside him. This letter is more difficult and it takes me several tries to even come close. In spite of my practice with the other letters my hands are still not used to this; to writing in any way but tapping. When I finally get it right and look up, I see that Ky is grinning at me.
“
So, I’ve learned K,” I say, grinning back. “That’s strange. I thought we were going alphabetically.”
“We were,” Ky tells me. “But I think K is a good letter to know.”
“What’s my next letter, then?” I ask with mock innocence. “Could it be Y?”
“It could,” Ky agrees. He’s no longer smiling but his eyes are mischievous.
The whistle sounds behind and below us. Hearing it, I wonder how I could have ever thought that the birdcall I heard earlier sounded anything like the Officer’s whistle. One sounds metallic and man-made and the other is high and clear and lovely.
I sigh and brush my hand across the dirt, returning the letters to the earth. Then I reach for a rock to make a cairn. Ky does the same. Together we build the tower piece by piece.
When I put the last rock on top of the pile, Ky puts his hand over mine. I do not pull it away. I do not want anything to fall and I like the feeling of his rough warm hand on top of mine with the cool smooth surface of the rocks underneath. Then I turn my hand slowly so that my palm is up and our fingers intertwine.
“I can never be Matched,” he says, looking first at our hands and then into my eyes. “I’m an Aberration.” He waits for my reaction.
“But you’re not an Anomaly,” I say, trying to make light of things, knowing immediately that it’s a mistake; there’s nothing light about this.
“Not yet, anyway,” he says, but the humor in his voice sounds forced.
It is one thing to make a choice and it is another thing to never have the chance. I feel a sharp cold loneliness deep within me. What would it be like to be alone? To know that you could never choose anything else?
That’s when I realize that the statistics the Officials give us do not matter to me. I know there are many people who are happy and I am glad for them. But this is Ky. If he is the one person who falls by the wayside while the other ninety-nine are happy and fulfilled, that is not right with me anymore. I realize that I don’t care about the Officer pacing below or the other hikers among the trees or really anything else at all, and that is when I realize how dangerous this truly is.
“But if you were Matched,” I say softly, “what do you think she’d be like?”
“You,” he says, almost before I’ve finished. “You.”
We do not kiss. We do nothing but hold on and breathe, but still I know. I cannot go gently now. Not even for the sake of my parents, my family.
Not even for Xander.
CHAPTER 22
A few days later, I sit in Language and Literacy, staring at the instructor as she talks about the importance of composing succinct messages when communicating via port. Then, as if to illustrate her point, one such message comes through the main port in the classroom.
“Cassia Reyes. Procedural. Infraction. An Official will arrive to escort you shortly.”
Everyone turns to look at me. The room goes silent: students stop tapping on their scribes; their fingers stilled. Even the instructor allows an expression of pure surprise to cross her face; she doesn’t try to keep teaching. It’s been a long time since someone here committed an Infraction. Especially one announced publicly.
I stand up.
In some ways, I am ready for this. I expect it. No one can break as many rules as I have and not get caught somehow, sometime.
I gather my reader and scribe, dropping them into my bag with my tablet container. It seems very important, suddenly, to be ready for the Official. For I have no doubt which Official will come this time. The first one, the one from the greenspace near the game center, the one who told me everything would be all right and nothing would change with my Match.
Did she lie to me? Or did she tell the truth, and my choices made a lie of her words?
The teacher nods to me as I leave the room, and I appreciate this simple courtesy.
The hall is empty, long, the floor slick-surfaced from a recent cleaning. Yet another place where I cannot run.
I don’t wait for them to come for me. I walk down the hall, setting my feet precisely on the tile, careful, careful, not to slip, not to fall, not to run while they are watching.
She is there in the greenspace next to the school. I have to walk across the paths to sit on another bench under her eye. She waits. I walk.
She does not stand to greet me. When I come close to her, I do not sit down. It’s bright out here, and I squint my eyes against the white of her uniform and the metal of the bench, both dazzling, sharp, crisp in the sunlight. I wonder if she and I see things differently now that we don’t just see what we hope to see.
“Hello, Cassia,” she says.
“Hello.”
“Your name has come up lately in several Society departments.” She gestures for me to sit. “Why do you think that is?”
There could be any number of reasons, I think to myself. Where do I begin? I’ve hidden artifacts, read stolen poems, learned how to write. I’ve fallen in love with someone who’s not my Match and I’m keeping that fact from my Match.
“I’m not sure,” I say.
She laughs. “Oh, Cassia. You were so honest with me the last time we talked. I should have known it might not last.” She points at the spot on the bench next to her. “Sit down.”
I obey. The sun shines almost directly overhead, the light unflattering. Her skin looks papery and misted with sweat. Her edges seem blurred, her uniform and its insignia small, less powerful than the last time we talked. I tell myself this so that I won’t panic, so that I won’t give anything away, especially Ky.
“There’s no need to be modest,” she says. “Surely you have some idea of how well you performed on your sorting test.”
Thank goodness. Is that why she’s here? But what about the Infraction?
“You have the highest score of the year. Of course, everyone is fighting to get you assigned to their department for your vocation. We in the Match Department are always looking for a good sorter.” She smiles at me. Like last time, she offers relief and comfort, reassurance about my place in the Society. I wonder why I hate her so much.
In a moment I know.
“Of course,” she says, her tone now touched with what sounds like regret, “I had to tell the testing Officials that, unless we see a change in some of your personal relationships, we would be averse to hiring you. And I had to mention to them that you might also be unfit for other sorting-related work if these things keep up.”
She doesn’t look at me as she says all of this; she watches the fountain in the center of this greenspace, which I suddenly notice has run dry. Then she turns her gaze on me and I feel my heart racing, my pulse pounding clear to my fingertips.
She knows. Something, at least, if not everything.
“Cassia,” she says kindly. “Teenagers are hot-blooded. Rebellious. It’s part of growing up. In fact, when I checked your data, you were predicted to have some of these feelings.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you do, Cassia. But it’s nothing to worry about. You might have certain feelings for Ky Markham now, but by the time you are twenty-one, there is a ninety-five percent chance that it will all be over.”
“Ky and I are friends. We’re hiking partners.”
“Don’t you think this happens quite often?” the Official says, sounding amused. “Almost seventy-eight percent of teenagers who are Matched have some kind of youthful fling. And most of those occur within the year or so after the Matching. This is not unexpected.”
I hate the Officials the most when they do this: when they act as if they have seen it all before, as if they have seen me before. When really they have never seen me at all. Just my data on a screen.
“Usually, all we do in these situations is smile and let things work themselves out. But the stakes are higher for you because of Ky’s Aberration status. Having a fling with a member of Society in good standing is one thing. For the two of you, it’s different. If things continue, you could be declared an Aberratio
n yourself. Ky Markham, of course, could be sent back to the Outer Provinces.” My blood runs cold, but she isn’t finished with me yet. She moistens her lips, which are as dry as the fountain behind her. “Do you understand?”
“I can’t quit speaking to him. He’s my hiking partner. We live in the same neighborhood—”
She interrupts me. “Of course you may talk with him. There are other lines you should not cross. Kissing, for example.” She smiles at me. “You wouldn’t want Xander to know about this, would you? You don’t want to lose him, do you?”
I am angry, and my face must show it. And what she says is true. I don’t want to lose Xander.
“Cassia. Do you regret your decision to be Matched? Do you wish that you had chosen to be a Single?”
“That’s not it.”
“Then what is it?”
“I think people should be able to choose who they Match with,” I say lamely.
“Where would it end, Cassia?” she says, her voice patient. “Would you say next that people should be able to choose how many children they have, and where they want to live? Or when they want to die?”
I am silent, but not because I agree. I am thinking of Grandfather. Do not go gentle.
“What Infraction have I committed?” I ask.
“Excuse me?”
“When they called me out of school over the port, the message said I’d committed an Infraction.”
The Official laughs. Her laugh sounds easy and warm, which makes a shiver of cold prickle my scalp. “Ah, that was a mistake. Another one, it seems. They seem to keep happening where you are concerned.” She leans a little closer. “You haven’t committed an Infraction, Cassia. Yet.”
She stands up. I keep my eyes on the dry fountain, willing the water back to it. “This is your warning, Cassia. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” I say to the Official. The words are not entirely a lie. I do understand her, on some level. I know why she has to keep things safe and stable and some part of me respects that. I hate that most of all.
When I finally meet her gaze, her expression is satisfied. She knows she’s won. She sees in my eyes that I won’t risk making things worse for Ky.
