Crossed

CHAPTER 30 CASSIA

On the wall across from the angels, there is a very different painting. I did not notice it before, so intent was I on the picture of the angels. The others all sleep; even Ky has slumped over near the door where he insisted on keeping watch.

I climb out of the bed and try to decide what the painting represents. It has curves, angles, and shapes, but I don’t know what it could be. None of the Hundred look like this. They are all clearly people, places, things. After a few moments, I hear Ky move at the other end of the room. Our eyes meet across the gray expanse of floor and the huddled dark shapes of Indie and Eli. Silently, Ky rises to his feet and comes to stand next to me. “Did you sleep enough?” I whisper.

“No,” he says, leaning in and closing his eyes.

When he opens them again neither of us have words or breath left.

We both look at the painting. After a few moments, I ask, “Is it a canyon?” but even as I name the picture, I realize it could be something else. Someone’s flesh cut open, a sunset striping above a river.

“Love,” he says, finally.

“Love?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says.

“Love,” I repeat softly, still puzzled.

“I think ‘love’ when I look at it,” Ky says, trying to explain. “You might think something else. It’s like the Pilot in your poem — everyone thinks something different when they hear that name.”

“What do you think of when you hear my name?” I ask him.

“Many things,” Ky whispers, sending rivers of chills along the length of my skin. “This. The Hill. The Carving. Places we’ve been together.” He pulls back and I feel him looking at me and I hold my breath because I know there is so much he sees. “Places we haven’t been together,” he says, “yet.” His voice sounds fierce as he speaks of the future.

We both want to move, to be outside. Indie and Eli still sleep and we don’t disturb them; they’ll be able to see us from the window when they awake.

This canyon that I earlier thought so barren and dry has surprising amounts of green, especially near the stream. Watercress laces the edges of the marshy banks; moss jewels the red rocks along the river; swamp grass tangles green blades with gray. I step against the ice at the edge of the stream and it breaks, reminding me of the time I shattered the glass that protected my dress fragment back in the Borough. Looking down at where I’ve pressed my foot, I see that even the ice I’ve broken is green under the white. It is exactly the color of my dress at the Match Banquet. I noticed none of this green the first time through the canyon; I was so fixed on finding a sign of Ky.

I look up at him walking along the stream and notice the ease of his walk, even when he steps in places where shifting sands have drifted across the path. He looks back at me and stops and smiles.

You belong here, I think. You move differently than you did in the Society. Everything about the township seems right for him — the beautiful, unusual paintings, the stark independence of the town.

All that’s missing are people for him to help lead. He only has the few of us.

“Ky,” I say as we reach the edge of the stand of trees.

He stops. His eyes are all for me, and his lips have touched mine, and brushed my neck, my hands, the insides of my wrists, each finger. While we stood kissing that night under the cold burning stars and held on tight, it did not feel that we were stealing time. It felt that it was all our own.

“I know,” he says.

We hold each other’s eyes for another long moment before we duck under the branches of the trees. They have weathered gray bark and drifts of brown leaves underneath that move and sigh with the canyon wind.

As the leaves shift, I see other flat gray stones on the ground like the one Hunter put down yesterday. I touch Ky’s arm. “Are these all—”

“Places where people are buried,” he says. “Yes. It’s called a graveyard.”

“Why didn’t they bury them higher?”

“They needed that land for the living.”

“But the books,” I say. “They stored those high and books aren’t living.”

“The living still have use for books,” Ky says softly. “Not for bodies. If a graveyard floods, nothing is ruined that wasn’t already gone. It’s different with the library.”

I crouch down to look at the stones. The places where people lie are marked in different ways. Names, dates, sometimes a line of verse. “What is this writing?” I ask.

“It’s called an epitaph,” he says.

“Who chooses it?”

“It depends. Sometimes if the person knows they are dying, they choose it. Often it’s those left behind who have to choose something that fits the person’s life.”

“That’s sad,” I say. “But beautiful.”

Ky raises his eyebrows at me and I hurry to explain. “The deaths aren’t beautiful,” I say. “I mean the idea of the epitaph. The Society chooses what’s left of us when we die there. They say what goes on your history.” Still, I wish again that I had taken the time to view Grandfather’s microcard more closely before I left. But Grandfather did decide what was left of him as far as preservation goes: nothing.

“Did they make stones like this in your family’s village?” I ask Ky, and as soon as I do I wish I hadn’t done it, wish I hadn’t asked for that part of the story yet.

Ky looks at me. “Not for my parents,” he says. “There wasn’t time.”

“Ky,” I say, but he turns away and walks down another row of stones. My hand feels cold now without his around it.

I shouldn’t have said anything. Except for Grandfather, the people I have seen dead were not people I loved. It is as though I have peered down into a long dark canyon where I have not had to walk.

As I move between the stones, careful not to step on them, I see that the Society and Hunter are right about the life expectancy out here. Most of the life spans don’t reach eighty years. And other children lie in the ground, too, besides the one Hunter buried.

“So many children died here,” I say out loud. I’d hoped the girl yesterday was an exception.

“Young people die in the Society too,” Ky says. “Remember Matthew.”

“Matthew,” I repeat, and as I hear his name, I suddenly remember Matthew, really remember him, think of him by name for the first time in years instead of as just the first Markham boy, the one who died in a rare tragedy at the hands of an Anomaly.

Matthew. Four years older than Xander and me; so much older as to be untouchable, unreachable. He was a nice boy who said hello to us in the street but was years ahead of us. He carried tablets and went to Second School. The boy I remember, now that his name has been given back to me, was enough like Ky to be his cousin; but taller, bigger, less quick and smooth.

Matthew. It was almost as though his name died with him, as though naming the loss would have made it more real.

“But not as many,” I say. “Just him.”

“He’s the only one you remember.”

“Were there others?” I ask, shocked.

A sound from behind makes me turn; it’s Eli and Indie closing the door to our borrowed house. Eli lifts a hand to wave and I wave back. The light is full in the sky now; Hunter will be here soon.

I look down at the stone he placed yesterday and reach out and put my hand on the name carved there. SARAH. She had few years; she died at five. Under the dates is a line of writing, and with a chill I realize that it sounds like a line from a poem:

SUDDENLY ACROSS THE JUNE A WIND WITH FINGERS GOES

I reach for Ky’s hand and hold on as tight as I can. So that the cold wind around us won’t try to steal him from me with its greedy fingers, its hands that take things from times that should be spring.