Matched (13 page)

We reach his stop first. He climbs off without looking back.

 

From the raised air-train platform, the rubble of the old library appears to be covered in enormous black spiders. The huge black incinerators spread their leglike tubes out across the bricks and over the edges into the basement of the library. The rest of the building has all been torn away.

I climb down the stairs and walk toward the library. I’m out of place at this work site. But not forbidden. Still, it would be better if no one saw me yet. I edge close enough to see down into the hole. The workers, most dressed in blue plainclothes, suck up piles of papers with the incineration tubes. My father told us that right when they thought they had gone through everything, they found steel boxes of books buried down in the basement. Almost as though someone tried to hide and preserve the books against the future. My father and the other Restoration specialists have been through the boxes and they haven’t found anything special, so they will incinerate all of it.

One figure wears white. An Official. My father. All workers have protective helmets, so I can’t see his face, but the confidence is back in his walk. He moves purposefully, in his element, giving directions and pointing out where he wants the tubes to go next.

Sometimes I forget that my father is an Official. I rarely see him on-duty, in his uniform, which he changes into at work. The sight of him in his uniform simultaneously comforts me—they didn’t take away his ranking after last night, at least not yet—and sets me on edge. It is strange to see people in different ways.

Another thought crosses my mind: before he turned seventy and was required to quit work,
Grandfather
was an Official.
But it’s different with Papa and Grandfather
, I tell myself. Neither of them are, or were, high-level Officials in places like the Match Department or the Safety Department. Those are the ones that do most of the Official-type things, like implement rules. We’re thinkers, not enforcers: learners, not doers.

Most of the time. My great-grandmother, an Official herself, did steal that poem.

My father glances once at the sky, aware of the impending thunderstorm. Speed is important, but they have to be methodical. “We can’t just set things on fire,” he’s told me. “The tubes are like the incineration devices at home. They record the amount and type of the matter destroyed.” There are a few piles of books left and, as I watch, the workers move from one to another, following his orders. It’s faster to incinerate individual pages instead of books, so they slice the books open, gutting them along the spines, preparing them for the tubes.

My father looks at the sky again and gestures in a “hurry up” motion to the other workers. I need to get back to school, but I keep watching.

I’m not the only one. As I glance up, over across the chasm of spiders and books, I see another figure in white. An Official. Watching, too. Checking on my father.

The site personnel drag the incineration tube to a newly readied pile. The books’ backs are broken; their bones, thin and delicate, fall out. The workers shove them toward the incineration tube; they step on them. The bones crackle under their boots like leaves. It reminds me of fall, when the City brings around the incineration equipment to our neighborhoods and we shovel the fallen maple leaves into the tubes. My mother always laments the waste, since decayed leaves can be good fertilizer, just as my father laments the waste of the paper that could be recycled when he has to incinerate a library. But the higher Officials say some things are not worth saving. Sometimes it’s faster and more efficient to destroy.

One leaf escapes. Caught on a swirl of wind from the impending thunderstorm, it rises up, almost reaching my feet as I stand near the edge of this small canyon that was once a library. It hovers there, so close I can almost see the words written on it, and then the wind dies down for a moment and it falls back.

I glance up. Neither Official watches me. Not my father, not the other. My father is intent on the books he’s destroying; the other Official is intent on my father. It’s time.

I reach into my pocket and pull out the paper Grandfather gave me. I let go of it.

It dances on the air for a moment before it falls, too. A fresh gust of wind almost saves it, but a worker catches sight of it and lifts a tube up to suck the paper from the air, to suck the words from the sky.

I stand and watch until all the bones are shoved into the incineration tubes, until all the words have been turned into ash and nothing.

 

I lingered too long at the library work site and I’m almost late for class. Xander waits for me near the main doors of Second School.

He pushes one of them open, holding its weight with his shoulder. “Is everything all right?” he asks quietly as I stop there in the doorway.

“Hi, Xander,” someone calls out to him. He nods in their direction, but doesn’t look away.

For a moment, I think that I should tell Xander everything. Not just about what happened last night with the Officials, which is what has him worried, but
everything
. I should tell him about Ky’s face on the screen. I should tell him about Ky in the woods, how he saw the poem. I should tell Xander about the poem itself and the way it felt to let it go. Instead, I shake my head. I don’t want to talk right now.

Xander changes the subject, his eyes lighting up. “I almost forgot. I have something to tell you. There’s a new Saturday activity coming up.”

“Really?” I ask, grateful to him for understanding, for not pressing further. “Is there a new showing?”

“No, even better. We can replant the flower beds in front of First School and eat dinner outside. Like a—what’s the word?—like a picnic. There’s going to be ice cream afterward, too.”

The enthusiasm in Xander’s voice makes me smile a little. “Xander, that’s nothing but a glorified work project. They want some free labor and they’re bribing us with ice cream.”

He grins at me. “I know, but it’s good to have a break. Keeps me fresh for the games the next time. So you want to plant, too, right? I know the spots will fill up fast, so I signed you up already in case you did.”

A tiny bit of annoyance that he did this without talking to me first flashes through me, but it vanishes almost instantly when I notice that his smile seems a little awkward. He knows he’s crossed a line—he never would have done something like this before we were Matched—and the fact that he worries about it makes it all right. Besides, even though it
is
a glorified work project, I would have signed up in a heartbeat myself. Xander knows that. He knows me and he looks out for me.

“That’s fine,” I tell Xander. “Thanks.” He lets go of the door and we walk into the hall together. In the back of my mind I find myself wondering what Ky will do that night. They don’t tell you about free-rec options at work. By the time he gets home and finds out about it, the spots will likely be full because of the newness of the activity and because of the ice cream. We could sign him up, though. I could walk over to one of the ports here at the school and . . .

Time’s up. The chime rings over the speakers in the hall.

Xander and I duck through the classroom door, slide into our desks and take out our readers and scribes. Piper usually sits next to us in Applicable Sciences, but I don’t see her. “Where’s Piper?”

“I meant to tell you. She got her final work position today.”

“She did? What is it?”

But the chime rings again and I have to face front and wait to find out until after class. Piper has her vocation! A few people get them early, like Ky, but the rest of us receive them at some point during the year after our seventeenth birthday. One by one we get picked off until everyone is gone and there’s no one left in our year at Second School.

I hope Xander and Em don’t get called for a long time. It wouldn’t be the same here without them, especially without Xander. I glance over at him. He gazes at the instructor as though this is all he wants to do in the world. His fingers tap on the scribe; he jiggles one foot impatiently, always ready to know more. It’s hard to keep up with him—he’s so smart, he learns so fast. What if he moves on soon to his vocation and leaves me behind?

Things are happening so quickly. Getting to my seventeenth birthday felt like steps taken slowly down a path where I saw each pebble, noticed each leaf, and felt pleasantly bored and anticipatory at the same time. Now it feels as if I am running down the path, flat out and breathing hard. It feels like I’ll arrive at my Contract date in no time at all. Will things ever slow down again?

I look away from Xander.
Even if Xander gets his vocation first, we’re still Matched
, I remind myself. He’s not going to leave me behind. He doesn’t know that I saw Ky’s face that day on the screen.

If I told Xander, would he understand? I think he would. I don’t think it would jeopardize our Match, or our friendship. All the same, those are two things I don’t want to risk losing.

I look back up at the instructor. The window behind her is dark, the sky filled with heavy low clouds. I wonder what they’d look like from the top of the big Hill. Can you climb high enough to get above the clouds, look down on the rain from a place in the sun?

Without meaning to, I envision Ky on the hill, face turned to the warmth. I close my eyes for a moment, imagining I am up there too.

 

The thunderstorm finally hits in the middle of class. I picture the rain in that greenspace where I met with the Official, making the fountain overflow and pounding the bench where I sat. I imagine I can hear the drops slap as they hit the metal, sigh as they reach the grass and dirt. It is dark as evening outside. The water beats on the roof and streams through the rain gutters. The one window in our classroom is sheeted and shaded in rain and we can’t see out for the flood.

A line from that other poem, the Tennyson one, comes to mind suddenly:
The flood may bear me far
.

If I had kept the poems from Grandfather, I’d be riding on a flood that I couldn’t stop. I did what I had to do; I did the right thing. But it is as though the rain outside pours on me, too, eroding my relief and leaving only regret: The poems are gone, and I can never get them back.

A
t work that evening, we have an interesting sort for a change. Even Norah becomes animated as she describes it to me at her desk. “We’re looking at different physical traits for a Matching pool,” she says. “Eye color. Hair color. Height and weight.”

“Is the Match Department going to use our sorts?” I ask.

She laughs. “Of course not. It’s for practice. This is to see if you pick up patterns in the Matchees’ data that the Officials have already noticed.”

Of course.

“There’s something else,” Norah adds. She lowers her voice, not because this is a secret but because she doesn’t want to distract the others from their work. “The Officials told me that they’re going to administer your next test personally.”

This is a good sign. This means that they want to see for themselves if I can work under pressure. This means that they may be considering me for one of the more interesting sorting-related vocations.

“Do you know when?”

She does, I can see, but she’s not supposed to tell me. “Sometime soon,” she says again, vaguely, and then she gives me one of her rare smiles. She turns back to her screen and I go to my station to get started.

This is good
, I think. I might get an optimal vocation assignment if I can impress the Officials enough. Everything is going well again. I won’t think about Grandfather and the lost sample and the burned poems or my father and the Officials searching him. Or that Ky won’t ever get to be Matched to anyone or work anywhere besides the nutrition disposal center. I won’t think about any of it. It’s time to clear my mind and sort.

 

It is actually rather startling when you sort eye colors, how limited the possibilities truly are: such a small, finite number of options. Blue, brown, green, gray, hazel—these are all of the options for eye color, even with many ethnicities represented in the population. Long ago there were genetic mutations, like albinos, but those don’t exist anymore. Hair color is similarly limited: black, brown, blond, red.

So few options, and yet an infinite number of variations. For example, plenty of boys in this database have blue eyes and dark hair like Ky, but I am positive that not one of them looks as he does. And even if someone did, if one of those boys looked exactly like him or if he had a twin somehow, no one else could have the combination of movement and restraint, of honesty and secrecy, that Ky has. His face keeps appearing in my mind, but I know that it’s not the Society’s mistake anymore. It’s mine. I’m the one who keeps thinking of him when I should be thinking of Xander.

The tiny printer next to me beeps, and I jump.

I made a mistake and I didn’t notice my error within an acceptable time frame. A little slip of paper curls out onto the table next to me and I pick it up. “ERROR AT LINE 3568.” I hardly ever make errors, so this will cause interest. I go back to the line where the mistake was made and correct it. If this happens next week while the Officials are watching—

It won’t happen. I won’t let it happen. But before I lose myself in the sorting again, I allow myself one brief moment to think of Ky’s eyes, of his hand on my arm.

 

“Someone said a girl your age came to the work site today,” my father says. He came to meet me at the air-train stop, something he does now and then with Bram or me so that we can have a little one-on-one time before we get home. “Was it you?”

I nod. “They canceled hiking because of the rain, so I thought I’d come see you before school. Since I didn’t see you this morning. But you were busy and I didn’t have much time. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay.”