I can hardly wait for Second School and sorting to end so that I can look at what Ky has given me. I wait until I’m at home in the kitchen, eating my dinner alone because my work hours were long tonight. I hear my father and Bram playing a game on the port in the foyer and I feel safe enough to reach into my pocket and pul out Ky’s gift.
A napkin. My first reaction is disappointment. Why this? It’s a normal napkin, the kind we get from the meal hal s at Second School or the Arboretum or anywhere else. Brown and pulpy. Smeared and used. I have the impulse to incinerate it right away.
But.
When I open it up there are words inside. Gorgeous words. Cursive words. They were beautiful up on the green hil with the sound of wind in trees and they are beautiful here in my gray-and-blue kitchen with the grumbling of the incinerator in the background. Dark, curling, swirling words curve across the brown paper. Where dampness has touched them the words are slightly blurred.
And it’s not just words. He’s drawn things, too. The surface is covered with lines and meaning. Not a picture, not a poem, not the lyrics to a song, although my sorting mind notices the pattern of al these things. But I can’t classify them. This is nothing I have seen before.
I realize that I don’t even know what you would use to make marks like this. Al of the words I practice are written in the air or traced in the dirt.
There used to be tools for writing but I don’t know what they were. Even our paintbrushes in school were tethered to artscreens, our pictures wiped away almost immediately after we finished them. Somehow, Ky must know a secret, older than Grandfather and his mother and people before them. How to make. Create.
Two lives, he’s written.
Two lives, I whisper to myself. The words hush and hang in the room, too soft for the port to hear above the other sounds in the house. Almost too soft for me to hear above my heart beating fast. Faster than it ever has in the woods or on the tracker.
I should go to my room, to the relative privacy of that little place with my bed, my window. My closet where plainclothes hang, dead and stil . But I can’t stop staring. It’s hard, at first, for me to figure out what the picture is meant to be; but then I realize it’s him. Ky. Drawn twice, once on each side of the fold of the napkin. The line of his jaw gives it away; the shape of his eyes, the spareness and strength of his body. The spaces left empty; his hands and the nothing they hold, though they are cupped, tipped skyward, in both pictures.
That’s where the similarity between the pictures ends. In the first picture, he looks up at something in the sky, and he looks younger, his face is open. The figure there seems to think his hands might stil be fil ed. In the second, he is older, his face narrower, and he looks down at the ground.
Along the bottom he has written Which one is the true one, I don’t ask, they don’t tell.
Two lives. I think I understand this—his life before he came here, and his life after. But what does he mean by the line of song or poetry or plea at the end?
“Cassia?” my father cal s from the doorway, behind me. I scoop the napkin up with my foilware from dinner and take it al toward the incinerator and the recycling bin.
“Yes?”
Even if he sees it, it’s a napkin, I tel myself, looking at the brown square on my tray. We incinerate them after every meal, and it’s even the right kind of paper, not like the one Grandfather gave me. The incineration tube won’t register the difference. Ky is keeping you safe. I lift my eyes to my father.
“It’s a message for you on the port,” my father says. He doesn’t look down at what I carry; he’s focused on my face, to see what I’m thinking.
Maybe it’s there that the real danger lies. I smile, try to look unconcerned.
“Is it from Em?” I slide my foilware into the recycling bin. Only the napkin left.
“No,” my father says. “An Official from the Match Department.”
“Oh.” Just like that, I push the napkin down the incineration tube. “I’l be right there,” I say to my father. I feel the faintest hint of heat from the fire below as Ky’s story burns, and I wonder if I wil ever have the strength to hold onto something. Grandfather’s poems. Ky’s story. Or if I wil always be someone who destroys.
Ky told you to destroy it, I tel myself. The man who wrote the poem is gone, but Ky is not. We have to keep it that way. Keep him safe.
I fol ow my father into the foyer. Bram glares at me on his way out of the foyer because this message has interrupted his game. Hoping to hide my nervousness, I give him a playful shove as I walk toward the port.
The Official on the screen is not one I’ve seen before. He’s a cheerful, burly looking man, not at al the cerebral, ascetic type I imagine hovering over datascreens in the Match Department. “Hel o, Cassia,” he says. The col ar of his white uniform seems tight around his neck, and he has laugh lines near his eyes.
“Hel o.” I want to look down and see if my hands are stained from the drawings, the words, but I keep my eyes on the Official.
“It’s been over a month since your Match.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Other Matchees are arranging their first port-to-port communications now. I’ve spent the day putting those together for your peers. Of course, it would be rather ludicrous for you and Xander to have a formal port-to-port communication.” The Official laughs cheerful y. “Don’t you think?”
“I agree, sir.”
“The other Officials on the Matching Committee and I decided it makes the most sense for the two of you to have an outing together instead.
Supervised, of course, by an Official, as are communications for the other Matchees.”
“Of course.” Out of the corner of my eye I see my father standing in the door of his room, watching me. Watching over me. I’m glad he’s there.
Even though the idea of spending time with Xander isn’t at al new or scary, the idea of an Official at our meeting feels a little strange.
I hope it isn’t the Official from the greenspace, I think suddenly.
“Excel ent. You’l be eating outside of your home tomorrow night. Xander and the Official assigned to your Match wil pick you up at your regular mealtime.”
“I’l be ready.”
The Official signs off and the port beeps, indicating that we have another cal waiting. “We’re popular this evening,” I say to my father, glad of the distraction so we don’t have to talk about my outing with Xander. My father already looks hopeful and hurries to stand next to me. It is my mother.
“Cassia, can I speak with your father alone for a few minutes?” she asks me after we exchange hel os. “I don’t have much time to talk tonight. I have some things I need to tel him.” She looks tired, and she stil wears her uniform and insignia from work.
“Of course,” I say.
A knock sounds at the door and I go to answer it. It’s Xander. “We stil have a few minutes before curfew,” he says. “Do you want to come talk on the steps with me?”
“Of course.” I close the door behind me and go outside. The porch light shines bright above us and we are in ful view of the world—or at least the world of Mapletree Borough—as we sit down on the cement steps side by side. It feels good to be with Xander, in a different way than it feels good to be with Ky.
Stil . Being with Ky, being with Xander—both things feel like standing in the light. Different types of light, but neither feels dark.
“It sounds like the two of us have an outing tomorrow night,” Xander says.
“The three of us,” I say, and when he looks puzzled, I add, “Don’t forget the Official.”
Xander groans. “Right. How could I forget?”
“I wish we could go alone.”
“Me too.” Neither of us says anything for a moment. The wind sails along our street, ruffling the leaves on the maple trees. In the evening light the leaves look silver-gray; their colors are gone, sucked away for now by the night. I think of the night I sat with Grandfather and thought the same thing; I think of the old disease of color blindness, eliminated generations ago, and how the world might have looked to those people.
“Do you ever daydream?” Xander asks me.
“Al the time.”