“Because one prisoner wil almost always betray the other. They’l tel what they know to get a break.”
I think I know what he’s asking me. I’m getting better at reading his eyes, at knowing his thoughts. Perhaps it comes from knowing his story, from final y knowing more of him. I hand him a red cloth; neither of us try anymore not to let our fingers touch, come together, cling before letting go.
Ky continues. “But in the perfect scenario, neither would say anything.”
“And you think we can do that?”
“We’l never be safe,” Ky says, brushing my face with his hand. “I final y understand that. But I trust you. We’l keep each other as safe as we can for as long as we can.”
Which means that our kisses have to stay promises, promises left like his first kiss, soft on my cheek. Our lips do not meet. Not yet. For once we do that, the Infraction wil have been committed. The Society wil be betrayed. And so wil Xander. We both know this. How much time can we steal from them? From ourselves? Because I can see in his eyes that he wants that kiss as much as I do.
There are other parts to our lives: many hours of work for Ky; sorting and Second School for me. But when I look back, I know those moments won’t be remembered the way I remember each detail of those days with Ky, hiking on the Hil .
Except one memory, of a strained Saturday night at the showing theater where Xander holds my hand and Ky acts as though nothing is different.
There is a terrible moment at the end when the lights go up and I see the Official from the greenspace looking around. When she meets my eyes and sees my hand in Xander’s she looks at me and gives me a tiny smile and disappears. I glance over at Xander after she’s gone and an ache of longing goes through me, an ache so deep and real that I can stil feel it later, when I think of that night. The longing isn’t for Xander, it’s for the way things used to be between us. No secrets, no complications.
But stil . Though I feel guilty about Xander, though I worry for him, these days belong to Ky, to me. To learning more stories and writing more letters.
Sometimes Ky asks me if I remember things. “Remember Bram’s first day of school?” he asks me one day as we move fast through the forest to make up for al the time we spent writing earlier on the hike.
“Of course,” I say, breathless from hurrying and from thinking about his hands on mine. “Bram wanted to stay home. He caused a scene at the air-train stop. Everyone remembers that.” Children start First School the autumn after they turn six. It’s supposed to be an important rite of passage, a prequel to the Banquets to come. At the end of the first successful day, the children bring a smal cake home to eat after dinner, along with a tangle of brightly colored bal oons. I don’t know which Bram was more excited about—the cake, which we have so rarely, or the bal oons, which are unique to the occasion of the First Day. That was also the day he would receive his reader and scribe, but Bram didn’t care one bit about that part of it.
When the time came to board the train to First School, Bram wouldn’t get on. “I don’t want to go,” he said. “I’l stay here instead.”
It was morning and the station brimmed with people leaving for work and school. Heads turned to look at us as Bram refused to board the air train with my parents. My father looked worried but my mother took it in stride. “Don’t worry,” she whispered to me. “The Officials in charge of his pre-School care center warned me this might happen. They predicted he’d have a little trouble with this milestone.” Then she knelt down next to him and told him, “Let’s get on the train, Bram. Remember the bal oons. Remember the cake.”
“I don’t want them.” And then, to everyone’s surprise, he began to cry. Bram never cried, not even back when he was very smal . Al the confidence left my mother’s face, and she put her arms around him and held him tight. Bram is the second child she thought she might never have.
After having me quickly and easily, it took her years to become pregnant with him, and he was born weeks before her thirty-first birthday, the cutoff age for having children. We al feel lucky to have Bram, but my mother especial y.
I knew if the crying kept up much longer we’d be in trouble. Back then, an Official assigned to watch out for problems lived on each street.
So I said loudly to Bram, “Too bad for you. No reader, no scribe. You’l never know how to write. You’l never know how to read.”
“That’s not true!” Bram yel ed. “I can learn.”
“How?” I asked him.
He narrowed his eyes, but at least he stopped crying. “I don’t care if I can’t read or write.”
“That’s fine,” I said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw someone knocking on the Official’s door at the house right next to the air-train stop. No.
Bram already has too many citations from the care center.
The train swooshed to a stop and in that moment I knew what I had to do. I picked up his schoolbag and held it out to him. “It’s up to you,” I said, looking right into his eyes and holding his gaze. “You can grow up or you can be a baby.”
Bram looked hurt. I shoved the bag into his arms and whispered into his ear, “I know a way to play games on the scribe.”
“Real y?”
I nodded.
Bram’s face lit up. He took the bag and went through the air-train doors without a backward glance. My parents and I climbed on after him, and my mother hugged me tight once we were inside. “Thank you,” she said.
There weren’t any games on the scribe, of course. I had to invent some, but I’m not a natural sorter for nothing. It took Bram months to figure out that none of the other kids had older siblings who hid patterns and pictures in screens ful of letters and then timed them to see how fast they could find them al .
That was why I knew before anyone else that Bram would never be a sorter. But I stil invented levels and records of achievement and spent almost al my free time during those months coming up with games I thought he would like. And even when he figured it out, he wasn’t mad. We’d had too much fun, and after al , I hadn’t lied. I had known a way to play games on the scribe.
“That was the day,” Ky says now, and stops.
“What?”
“The day I knew about you.”
“Why?” I say, feeling hurt somehow. “Because you could see I fol owed the rules? That I made my brother fol ow them, too?”
“No,” he says, as if it should be obvious. “Because I saw the way you cared about your brother and because I saw that you were smart enough to help him.” Then he smiles at me. “I already knew what you looked like, but that day was when I first knew about you.”
“Oh,” I say.
“What about me?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“When did you first see me?”
For some reason I can’t tel him. I can’t tel him that it was his face on the screen the morning after my Match Banquet—the mistake—that made me first begin to think of him this way. I can’t tel him that I didn’t see him until they told me to look.
“On the top of the first hil ,” I say instead. And I wish that I did not have to tel him this lie, when he knows more of my truth than anyone else in the world.
Later that night I realize that Ky did not give me any more of his story and I did not ask. Perhaps it is because now I live in his story. Now I am a part of his, and he of mine, and the part we write together sometimes feels like the only part that matters.
But stil , the question haunts me: What happened when the Officials took him away and the sun was red and low in the sky?
Our time together feels like a storm, like wild wind and rain, like something too big to handle but too powerful to escape. It blows around me and tangles my hair, leaves water on my face, makes me know that I am alive, alive, alive. There are moments of calm and pause as there are in every storm, and moments when our words fork lightning, at least for each other.
We hurry up the Hil together, touching hands, touching trees. Talking. Ky has things to tel me and I have things to tel him and there is not enough time, not enough time, never enough time.
“There are people who cal themselves Archivists,” Ky says. “Back when the Hundred Committee made their selections, the Archivists knew the works that didn’t get selected would become a commodity. So they saved some of them. The Archivists have il egal ports, ones they’ve built themselves, for storing things. They saved the Thomas poem I brought you.”
“I had no idea,” I say, touched. I never thought that someone might think far enough ahead to save some of the poems. Did Grandfather know this? It doesn’t seem like he did. He never gave them his poems to save.
Ky puts his hand on my arm. “Cassia. The Archivists aren’t altruistic. They saw a commodity and they did what they could to preserve it. Anyone can have it who’s wil ing to pay, but their prices are high.” He stops as though he’s revealed too much—that this poem cost him something.
“What did you trade with them?” I ask, suddenly afraid. As far as I know, Ky has two things of value: his artifact and the words of the Do not go gentle poem. I don’t want him to give up the artifact, his last tie to his family. And for some reason, the thought of our poem being traded repulses me. Selfishly, I don’t want just anyone to have it. I realize that I’m not much better than the Officials in this regard.