“I see,” I say, realizing why our hikes on the little hil 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 hil .”
“We were never al owed 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 shril birdcal 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 tel his story?” I don’t understand, and for a second I feel betrayed. Why did Ky tel me about this person and make me feel empathy for him when there’s no proof that he ever lived at al ?
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 smel here that I have smel ed before: a smel of decay, but it doesn’t seem rotten. It smel s almost rich, the scent of the plants returning to the earth, of wood giving way to dust.
But the Hil 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 smal clearing.
His face tightens. “I have to.”
“Every time? Don’t you even let yourself think about winning?”
“I always think about winning,” Ky tel s 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.
“Wel ?” Ky asks.
“Everything,” I tel him. “They’re everything.”
Neither of us moves for a moment, locked instead in each other’s eyes and in the branches of this Hil 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 smal fal en tree.
Behind me I hear Ky doing the same.
I’m fal ing 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 fal 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 fal 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 fal in the majority. Al 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 stil not used to this; to writing in any way but tapping. When I final y 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 alphabetical y.”
“We were,” Ky tel s 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 birdcal I heard earlier sounded anything like the Officer’s whistle. One sounds metal ic 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 pul it away. I do not want anything to fal 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 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 fal s by the wayside while the other ninety-nine are happy and fulfil ed, 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 real y anything else at al , 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 stil I know. I cannot go gently now. Not even for the sake of my parents, my family.