Matched

CHAPTER 23

The next morning I wake to a shrieking so high and keening that I bolt straight out of bed, tearing the sleep tags from my skin.

"Bram!" I scream.

He is not in his room.

I run down the hall to my parents' room. My mother came home from her trip last night; they should both be there. But their room is empty, too, and I can tell they left in a hurry: I see twisted sheets and a blanket on the floor. I draw back. It's been a long time since I've seen their bed unmade and, even in the fear of the moment, the intimacy of that tangled bedding catches my eye.

"Cassia?" My mother's voice.

"Where are you?" I call in a panic, turning around.

She hurries down the hall toward me, still wearing her sleepclothes. Her long, blond hair streams behind her, and she looks almost unearthly until she pulls me into arms that feel real and strong. "What happened?" she asks me. "Are you all right?"

"The screaming—" I say, looking around her for the source. Just then I hear another sound added to the screaming: the sound of metal on wood.

"It's not screaming," my mother says, her voice sad. "You're hearing the saws. They're cutting down the maple trees."

I hurry out onto the front steps where Bram and my father also stand. Other families wait outside, too, many of them still wearing their sleepclothes like us. This is another intimacy so shocking and unusual that I am taken aback. I can't think of another time when I've seen any of my neighbors dressed like this.

Or maybe I can. The time when Patrick Markham went out and walked up and down the street in his sleepclothes after his son died, and Xander's father found him and brought him home.

The saw bites into the trunk of our maple tree, slices through so fast and clean that at first I think nothing happened except the scream. The tree seems fine for a brief moment, but it is dead as it stands. Then it falls.

"Why?" I ask my mother.

When she doesn't answer right away, my father puts his arm around her and tells me. "The maple trees have become too much of a problem. The leaves get too messy in the fall. They're not growing uniformly. For example, ours grew too big. Em's is too small. And some of them have diseases, so they all need to be chopped down."

I look at our tree, at its leaves still reaching for the sun, still working to turn light into food. They don't know they are dead yet. Our yard looks like a different place without the tree standing tall in front of our house. Things seem smaller.

I look over at Em's house. Her yard, on the other hand, doesn't look much different now that their sad little tree is gone, the one that never quite grew. It was never much more than a stick-stalk of a tree with a little burst of leaves on the top. "It's not as bad for Em," I say. "Her tree isn't as much of a loss."

"It's sad for all of us," my mother says fiercely.

Last night when I couldn't sleep, I crouched down near the wall to listen to her talk with my father. They spoke so softly that I couldn't make out any of the words, but she sounded tired and sad. Eventually I gave up and climbed back into bed. Now she looks angry, standing in front of the house with her arms folded across her chest.

The workers with the saws have already moved on to another house now that our tree is down. That part was easy. Tearing up the roots will be the hard part.

My father holds my mother close. He doesn't love the trees the way she does; but he loves other things that were destroyed and he understands. My mother loves the plants; my father loves the history of things. They love each other.

And I love them both.

It isn't only myself and Ky and Xander I'll hurt if I commit an Infraction. It's all these other people I love.

"It's a warning," my mother says, almost to herself.

"I didn't do anything!" Bram exclaims. "I haven't even been late to school in weeks!"

"The warning isn't for you," my mother says. "It's for someone else."

My father puts his hands on my mother's shoulders and it is as though they are alone, the way he looks at her. "Molly, I promise. I didn't..."

And at the same time, I open my mouth to say something—I don't know what—something about what I have done and how this is all my fault. But before my father can finish and I can begin, my mother speaks.

"It's a warning for me."

She turns and goes back into the house, brushing a hand across her eyes. As I watch her go, the guilt slices quick through me like the cuts in the tree.

I don't think the warning is for my mother.

If the Officials truly can see my dreams, they should be happy with what I dreamed last night. I burned the last of Ky's story in the incinerator, but afterward I kept thinking of what it showed, what it told me: The sun was red and low in the sky when the Officials came to get him.

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 tell; 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 tell which one will 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 tell she's deep in thought. When I ask her questions about her trip, she answers carefully, and finally I stop.

Ky rides the same air train we do, and he and I walk together toward the Hill. 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 follow 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 pulls 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. Well 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. "Ifs 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. "Will 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 water—

Birds 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 Hall. 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 follows 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, full of promise.