So then, when I dreamed, I saw scene after scene of Ky surrounded by Officials in their white uniforms with a red sky behind him, a glimpse of sun waiting on the horizon. Whether it was rising or setting, I could not tel ; I had no sense of direction in the dream. In each dream he did not show any fear. His hands did not shake; his expression remained calm. But I knew he was afraid, and when the red light of the sun hit his face it looked like blood.
I do not want to see this scene played out in real life. But I have to know more. How did he escape last time? What happened?
The two desires struggle within me: the desire to be safe, and the desire to know. I cannot tel which one wil win.
My mother hardly speaks as we ride the train to the Arboretum together. She looks over at me and smiles now and then, but I can tel she’s deep in thought. When I ask her questions about her trip, she answers careful y, and final y I stop.
Ky rides the same air train we do, and he and I walk together toward the Hil . I try to act friendly but reserved—the way we once were around each other—even though I want to touch his hand again, to look in his eyes and ask him about the story. About what happened next.
It only takes a few seconds in the forest before I lose control and I have to ask him. I put my hand on his arm as we fol ow our path to the spot where we last marked. When I touch him he smiles at me, and it warms my heart and makes it hard to take my hand away, to let go. I don’t know if I can do this, despite wanting him to be safe even more than I want him.
“Ky. An Official contacted me yesterday. She knows about us. They know about us.”
Ky nods. “Of course they do.”
“Did they talk to you, too?”
“They did.”
For someone who has spent his entire life avoiding attention from the Officials, he seems remarkably composed about this. His eyes are deep as ever but there is a calm there that I haven’t seen before.
“Aren’t you worried?”
Ky doesn’t answer. Instead, he reaches into the pocket of his shirt and pul s out a paper. He hands it to me. It’s different from the brown paper of napkins and wrappings that he’s been using—whiter, smoother. The writing on it is not his own. It’s from some kind of port or scribe, but something about it seems foreign.
“What is this?” I ask.
“A late birthday present for you. A poem.”
My jaw drops—a poem? How?—and Ky hurries to reassure me. “Don’t worry. We’l destroy the paper soon so we don’t get in trouble. It won’t take long to memorize.” His face is alight with happiness and I suddenly realize that Ky looks the slightest bit like Xander, with his face open and joyful like this. I am reminded of the shifting faces on the portscreen the day after I got my Match, when I saw Xander, then Ky. But now, I see only Ky.
Only Ky and no one else.
A poem. “Did you write it?”
“No,” he says, “but it’s by the same man who wrote the other poem. Do not go gentle.”
“How?” I ask him. There were no other poems by Dylan Thomas in the port at school.
Ky shakes his head, evading my question. “It’s not the whole thing. I could only afford part of a stanza.” Before I can ask what he gave in exchange for the poem, he clears his throat a little nervously and looks down at his hands. “I liked it because it mentions a birthday and because it reminds me of you. How I felt when I saw you that first day, in the water at the pool.” He looks confused and I see a trace of sadness on his face. “Don’t you like it?”
I hold the white paper, but my eyes are so blurred with tears that I can’t read it. “Here,” I say, thrusting the poem back at him. “Wil you read it to me?” I turn away and start walking through the trees, staggering almost, so blinded am I by the beauty of his surprise and so overwhelmed by possibility and impossibility.
Behind me, I hear Ky’s voice. I stop and listen.
My birthday began with the waterBirds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
I begin walking again, not bothering with cairns or cloths or anything that might slow me down. I’m careless and I disturb a group of birds, which flutters up and away from us into the sky. White on blue, like the colors of City Hal . Like the colors of angels.
“They’re flying your name,” Ky says from behind me.
I turn around and I see him standing in the forest, the white poem in his hand.
The birds’ cries fly away on the air with them. In the quiet that fol ows I don’t know who moves first, Ky or me, but soon there we are, standing close but not touching, breathing in but not kissing.
Ky leans toward me, his eyes holding mine, near enough that I can hear the slight crackle of the poem as he moves.
I close my eyes as his lips touch warm on my cheek. I think of the cottonwood seeds brushing against me that day on the air train. Soft, light, ful of promise.
Ky gives me three gifts for my birthday. A poem, a kiss, and the hopeless, beautiful belief that things might work. When I open my eyes, as I put my hand up to the place on my cheek where his lips touched, I say, “I didn’t give you anything on your birthday, I don’t even know when it is.” And he says, “Don’t worry about that,” and I say, “What can I do?” and he answers, “Let me believe in this, al of this, and you believe it, too.”
And I do.
For one entire day I let his kiss burn on my cheek and into my blood, and I don’t push the memory away. I have kissed and been kissed before.
This is different. This, more than my real birthday the day of the Match Banquet, feels like a day to mark time by. This kiss, these words, they feel like beginning.
I let myself imagine futures that can never be, the two of us together. Even when I sort later that day, I keep my mind on the task at hand by pretending each number sorted is a code, a message to Ky that I wil keep our secret. I wil keep us safe; I won’t reveal a thing. Each sort I perform correctly keeps attention away from us.
Since it is not my turn for the sleep tags that night, I let my dreams take me where they wil . To my surprise, I don’t dream of Ky on the Hil . I dream of him sitting on the steps in front of my house, watching the wind shuffle the leaves of the maple tree. I dream of him taking me to the private dining hal and pul ing my chair out, bending so close to me that even the pretend candles flutter at his presence. I dream of the two of us digging up the newroses in his yard and of Ky teaching me how to use the artifact. Everything I dream is something simple and plain and everyday.
That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have.
“How?” I ask him the next day on the Hil , once we are deep enough into the forest that no one can hear us. “How can we believe this might work?
The Official threatened to send you back to the Outer Provinces, Ky!”
Ky doesn’t answer for a moment, and I feel as though I’ve yel ed when real y I kept my voice as low as possible. Then we walk past the cairn from our last hike and he looks straight at me and I swear I feel that kiss again. But this time, I feel it on my lips instead.
“Have you ever heard of the prisoner’s dilemma?” Ky asks me.
“Of course.” Is he teasing me? “It’s the game you played against Xander. We’ve al played it before.”
“No, not the game. The Society changed the game. I mean the theory behind the game.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. “I guess not.”
“If two people commit a crime together, are caught, and then separated and interrogated, what happens?”
I am stil lost. “I don’t know. What?”
“That’s their dilemma. Do they tel on each other in hopes that the Officials wil go easy on them—a plea bargain? Do they refuse to say anything that would betray their partner? The best scenario is for both to say nothing. Then they can both be safe.”
We’ve stopped near a group of fal en trees. “Safe,” I say.
Ky nods. “But that never happens.”