“Of course not,” Xander says, thoughtful y. “He must have his reasons. I can respect that.”
Xander’s right. Ky does have his reasons, and they are good ones. I read them on the last napkin, the one with the stains that I know must be tomato sauce but that look like blood. Old blood.
“Let’s play one more time,” Ky says when we get back, his eyes on Xander. They flicker once, and I think he’s looked down at my hand in Xander’s, but I can’t be sure. His face shows nothing.
“Al right,” Xander says. “Chance or skil ?”
“Skil ,” Ky suggests. And something in his expression suggests that he might not throw the game this time. He might be in it to win.
Em rol s her eyes at me and gestures at the boys as if to say, “Can you believe how primitive this is?” But we both fol ow them to another table.
Livy comes, too.
I sit between Ky and Xander, equidistant from both of them. It’s as if I’m a piece of metal and they are two magnets and there’s a pul from either side. They’ve both taken risks for me—Xander with the artifact, Ky with the poem and the writing.
Xander is my Match and my oldest friend and one of the best people I know. When I kissed him, it was sweet. I’m drawn to him and tied to him with the cords of a thousand different memories.
Ky is not my Match, but he might have been. He’s the one who taught me how to write my name, how to keep the poems, how to build a tower of rocks that looks like it should fal but doesn’t. I have never kissed him and I don’t know if I ever wil , but I think it might be more than sweet.
It is almost uncomfortable, this awareness of him. Each pause, each movement when he places a piece on the black-and-gray board. I want to reach out and grab his hand and hold it to me, right over my heart, right where it aches the most. I don’t know if doing that would heal me or make my heart break entirely, but either way this constant hungry waiting would be over.
Xander plays with daring and intel igence, Ky with a kind of deep and calculated intuition; both are strong. They are so evenly matched.
It’s Ky’s move. In the quiet before Ky takes his turn, Xander watches him careful y. Ky’s hand hovers over the board. For a moment, as he holds the piece in the air, I see where he could put it to win and I know he sees it, too, that he planned the whole game for that last move. He looks at Xander and Xander looks back, both of them locked in some kind of chal enge that seems to run deeper and older than what’s happening here on this board.
Then Ky moves his hand and puts his piece down in a spot where Xander can eventual y overtake him for the win. Ky doesn’t hesitate once he places the piece; he sets it down with a solid sound and leans back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. I think I see the slightest hint of a smile on his lips but I can’t be sure; it’s gone faster than a snowflake on an air-train track.
Ky’s move may not be the bril iant one I know he could have made, but it’s not stupid, either. He made the move of an average player. When he looks back down from the ceiling, he meets my gaze and holds it, as he held the game piece earlier before putting it down. He tel s me something in that silent pause that he cannot say out loud.
Ky can play this game. He can play al of their games, including the one in front of him that he just lost. He knows exactly how to play, and that’s why he loses every time.
I have a hard time concentrating at sorting the next day. Sundays are for work; there are no leisure activities, so I won’t likely see Ky until Monday. I can’t talk to him about his story until then; I can’t say, “I’m sorry about your parents.” I said those words before, when he first came to live with the Markhams and we al welcomed him and expressed our condolences.
But it’s different now that I real y know what happened. Before, I knew they died, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know that he saw it rain down from the sky while he watched, helpless. Burning the napkin with that part of his story on it is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Like the books out at the Restoration site, like Grandfather’s poem, Ky’s story, bit by bit, is turning into ash and nothing.
Except. He remembers it, and now I do, too.
A message from Norah appears on my screen, interrupting my sort. Please report to the supervisor’s station. I lift my head to look across the sorting slots toward Norah, and then I stand straight up in surprise.
The Officials are back for me.
They watch me as I walk along the aisles of other workers and I think I see approval in their eyes. I feel relieved.
“Congratulations,” the gray-haired Official tel s me when I reach them. “You scored very wel on your test.”
“Thank you,” I say, as I always do to the Officials. But this time I mean it.
“The next step is a real-life sort,” the Official tel s me. “At some point in the near future, we wil come and escort you to the site of the test.”
I nod. I’ve heard about this, too. They’l take you to sort something real—actual data, like news, or actual people, or a smal subset of a school class—to see if you can apply things in the real world. If you can, you move on to the next step, which is likely your final work position.
This is happening quickly. In fact, everything seems hurried lately: the hasty removal of the artifacts from personal residences, my mother’s sudden trip, and now this, more and more of us leaving school early in the year.
The Officials wait for me to respond.
“Thank you,” I say.
In the afternoon my mother receives a message at work: Go home and pack. She is needed for another trip; it may be even longer than the last one.
I can tel my father doesn’t like this; and neither does Bram. Neither do I, as a matter of fact.
I sit on the bed and watch her as she packs. She folds her two extra sets of plainclothes. She folds her pajamas, underclothes, socks. She opens her tablet container and checks the tablets.
She’s missing one, the green tablet. She glances up at me and I look away.
It makes me think that perhaps these trips are harder than they seem and I realize that in seeing the missing tablet, I haven’t seen an example of her weakness but an example of her strength. What she’s dealing with is difficult enough to make her take the green tablet, so it must also be difficult to keep inside, to not share with us. But she is strong and she keeps the secrets because it protects us.
“Cassia? Mol y?” My father walks into the room and I stand up to leave. I move quickly over to my mother to embrace her. When I step back, our eyes meet and I smile at her. I want her to know that I know that I shouldn’t have looked away earlier. I’m not ashamed of her. I know how hard it is to keep a secret. I may be a sorter like my father and my grandfather before me, but I am also my mother’s daughter.
On Monday morning, Ky and I walk into the trees and find the spot where we stopped the time before. We start marking again with red flags. I wish it were so easy to begin where we left off in other ways. At first I hesitate, not wanting to disturb the peace of these woods with the horror of the Outer Provinces, but he has suffered so long alone that I can’t bear to make him wait one more minute.
“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 pul 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 Hil .”
“Someone whose story has been told for a long time.” Ky stands up and starts walking again. I can tel that he needs to keep moving today. “It was one of my father’s favorite stories to tel . 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 tel 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 fol ow close so that I can slip through the branches he holds back for me. The smel of the forest seems, for a moment, to be simply the smel of him. I wonder what sage smel s like, the smel he said was his favorite in his old life. I hope that the smel 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 rol 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 wel for Sisyphus, maybe it can end wel for Ky.