DUTTON BOOKS 20 страница

“I have to ask,” he says. “Are you the Pilot?”

“No,” I say. I stop at the door for a second and look back at Lei. You’re not supposed to do what we’ve done with this cure and Ky and let one patient take on so much significance. It’s just one person. Of course, one person can be the world.

We get the first set of data: They’re coming back. They look better.

According to the numbers, fifty-seven of the hundred can now track movement with their eyes. Three have spoken. Eighty-three patients total exhibit some kind of improvement: if not speech or sight, then better color, increased heart rate, and breathing that comes closer to normal levels. It’s taken them twice as long as it took Ky to exhibit these initial improvements, but at least the cure is working.

“Seventeen aren’t responding at all,” the head medic tells me. “We think they may have been still longer than we previously thought. There might have been a mistake in the record keeping.”

“Keep trying to get them back,” I say. “Give them the full two days of medication.”

The medic nods. I pick up the miniport and relay the information to the Pilot. “What do you think?” he asks me.

“I don’t think we should wait any longer,” I say. “I’ve trained the others here to make the cure. They can oversee their own labs in other Cities if we set them up. But we haven’t figured out how to synthesize it yet. Do you have enough bulbs?”

“We’ve found enough to begin,” he says. “We need more.”

“You’ve seen the data we’re getting,” I say. “Time matters.”

“What do you think we should we do first?” he asks. “Send it out to the other Cities now, or start here and then work outward?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Ask Cassia. She can sort it out best. I’m going back to the medical center to see the patients for myself.”

“Good,” the Pilot says.

I walk over to the medical center. There’s another patient I need to see whose data wasn’t included in the initial report. They haven’t been tracking her because they don’t know about her. The other medics nod to me when I come in but they leave me alone, and I’m glad.

The painting above her is the same one, that picture of the girl fishing. Lei stares up at the water, and I smile just in case. “Lei,” I say. That’s all I can get out before her eyes move the slightest bit and focus on me.

She’s here.

She sees me.

CHAPTER 56

CASSIA

Don’t ask your mother about your father or the flowers right away,” Xander told me. “Give her a little time. I know everyone says we don’t have any time, but she’s been under much longer than Ky. We’ve got to be careful.”

So I take his advice. I ask her no questions, I am only there, with Bram, holding her hands and telling her we love her. And the cure works on my mother. She seems glad that I am here, and to see Bram, but she is in and out, a different return than Ky’s. She was longer gone.

But she is strong. After a few days, she speaks, her voice a whisper, a little seed. “You’re both all right,” she says, and Bram puts his head down next to her on the bed and closes his eyes.

“Yes,” I say.

“We sent something to you,” she tells me. “Did you get it?” She looks at the medic who has come to change her line, and I can tell that she doesn’t want to speak too openly in front of him. And she doesn’t mention my father. Is she afraid to ask because she doesn’t want to know?

“It’s all right,” I tell her. “We can talk here. And I did get it. Thank you for sending the microcard. And the flower—” I pause for a moment, not wanting to rush her, but the time seems right. She brought up the gift. “It’s a sego lily, isn’t it?”

She smiles. “Yes,” she says. “You remembered.”

“I’ve seen them growing in the wild,” I say. “They’re as beautiful as you said they would be.”

She is holding on tight to this talk of flowers, as I did before, when I was afraid and alone. If you sing and speak of blooms and petals that come back after a long time of being winter-still, you don’t have to think about things that don’t.

“You were in Sonoma?” she asks. “When?”

“I wasn’t there,” I say. “I saw it growing someplace else. Was it in Sonoma that you saw the flowers?”

“Yes,” she says, no hesitation, no uncertainty. “In Sonoma’s Farmlands, just outside of a small city called Vale.”

I look back at the medic and he nods to me before he slips out of the room to relay the information. The crop was in Sonoma. My mother remembered.

There is so much I want to ask her, but that is enough for now. “I’m glad you’re back,” I say, and I put my head on her shoulder, and the three of us are together without him.

“Do you still have the microcard?” she asks later. “Could I see it again?”

“Yes,” I say. I pull my chair closer to the bed and hold up the datapod so that she can see the screen.

There they are again, the pictures: Grandfather with his parents, with my grandmother, my father.

“In parting, as is customary, Samuel Reyes made a list of his favorite memory of each of his surviving family members,” the historian says.

“The one he chose of his daughter-in-law, Molly, was the day they first met.” The historian’s voice sounds full and proud, as if this is a confirmation of the validity of Matching, which I suppose in a way it is. But it is also a confirmation of love. Of my grandfather letting go of my father and letting him choose what he wanted.

Tears stream down my mother’s cheeks. They are all gone now, the others from that meeting. My grandmother, who said that my mother still had the sun on her face. My grandfather. My father.

“His favorite memory of his son, Abran, was the day they had their first real argument.”

This time, I find the button to pause the microcard. Why would Grandfather choose a memory like that? I have so many memories of my father—his laugh, his eyes brightening as he talked about his work, the way he loved my mother, the games he taught us. My father was, first and foremost, a gentle man, and in spite of the poem advising otherwise, I hope that is the way that he went into the night.

“Why?” I ask softly. “Why would Grandfather say that about Papa?”

“It seems strange, doesn’t it,” my mother says, and I look over to see her watching me with tears slipping down her cheeks. She knows he’s gone, even though she hasn’t asked and I haven’t told.

“Yes,” I say.

“That memory happened before I knew your father,” my mother says. “But he told me about it.” She pauses, puts her hand flat against her chest. She finds it hard to breathe without him, I think, something in her is still drowning a little from loss. “Your father told me that your grandfather gave the poems to you, Cassia,” she says. “He tried to give them to your father, too.”

Now I cannot breathe. “He did?” I whisper. “Did Papa read them?”

“Just once,” my mother says. “Then he gave them back. He didn’t want them.”

“Why?”

My mother shakes her head. “He always told me that it was because he was happy in the Society. He wanted everything to be safe. He wanted what the Society could offer. That was his choice.”

“What did Grandfather do?” I ask. I imagine giving someone such a gift and then having it returned. Parents are always giving things that are not taken. Grandfather tried to give my father the poems and to tell him about the rebellion. My mother and father tried to give me safety.

“That was when they argued,” my mother says. “Your great-grandmother had saved the poems. And there was a certain legacy of rebellion attached to them. But Abran thought it was too dangerous, that your grandfather took too many risks. Eventually, Grandfather accepted your father’s decision.” She brings her hand down from her chest and breathes in more deeply.

“Did you know Grandfather would give the poems to me?” I ask.

“We thought he might,” my mother says.

“Why didn’t you stop him?”

“We didn’t want to take away your choices,” my mother says.

“But Grandfather never did tell me about the Rising,” I say.

“I think he wanted you to find your own way,” my mother says. She smiles. “In that way, he was a true rebel. I think that’s why he chose that argument with your father as his favorite memory. Though he was upset when the fight happened, later he came to see that your father was strong in choosing his own path, and he admired him for it.”

I see why my father had to honor Grandfather’s last request—to destroy his sample—even though my father didn’t agree with the choice. It was his turn to give that back; to be the one to respect and honor a decision made. And my father also extended that gift to me. I remember what he said in his note: Cassia, I want you to know that I’m proud of you for seeing things through, and for being braver than I was.

“That’s why the Rising didn’t make us immune to the red tablet,” Bram says to me. “Because they thought our father was weak. They thought he was a traitor.”

“Bram,” I say.

“I didn’t say I believe them,” Bram says. “The Rising was wrong.”

I look at my mother. Her eyes are closed. “Please,” she says. “Play the rest.”

I press the button on the datapod and the historian speaks again.

“His favorite memory of his grandson, Bram, was his first word,” the historian says. “It was ‘more.’”

Bram smiles a little.

“His favorite memory of his granddaughter, Cassia,” the historian says, and I lean forward to listen, “was of the red garden day.”

That’s all. The datapod goes blank.

My mother opens her eyes. “Your father is gone,” she says, her lips trembling.

“Yes,” I say.

“He died while you were still,” Bram says to my mother. His smile is gone, and his voice sounds heavy and sad, weary with telling this terrible news.

“I know,” my mother says, smiling through her tears. “He came to say good-bye.”

“How?” Bram asks.

“I don’t know,” she says. “But he did. When I was still, I saw him. He was there, and then he went away.”

“I saw him dead, but not the way you saw him,” Bram says. “I found his body.”

“Oh, Bram, no,” my mother says, her voice a whisper of agony. “No, no,” she says, and she gathers my brother close. “I’m sorry,” she tells him. “I’m so sorry.”

My mother holds Bram tightly. I draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can’t cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist. I want to do something to make this better, even though I know that nothing can change the fact of my father gone and under ground.

My mother looks at me and her gaze is pleading. “Can you bring me something,” she says, “anything, that is growing?”

“Of course,” I say.

I don’t know plants the way my mother does, so I’m not even sure what it is I dig up in the little courtyard of the medical center. It could be a weed, it could be a flower. But I think she’ll be happy with either—she just wants, needs, something to combat the sterility of her room and the emptiness of a world without my father.

I fold the foilware container I brought with me into a kind of cup, scoop the soil inside, and pull out the plant.

The roots dangle down, some thick, others so thin that the breeze goes through them as easily as it does the leaves. When I stand up, my knees are dusty, my hands are dark with dirt. I am bringing my mother a plant because there is no way I can bring my father back for her. I understand why people wanted the tubes; I am also desperate for something to hold on to.

And then, standing there with roots dripping dirt on my feet, the middle of the red garden day memory comes back to me. My mother, my father, Grandfather, his tissue sample, cottonwood seeds, flowers growing wild and made of paper, red buds folded up tight, the green tablet, Ky’s blue eyes, and suddenly I can follow Grandfather’s red garden day clue, I can take it and follow it up to leaves and branches and all the way down to the roots.

And I catch my breath with remembering

Everything.

My mother’s hands are printed black with dirt, but I can see the white lines crossing her palms when she lifts up the seedlings. We stand in the plant nursery at the Arboretum; the glass roof overhead and the steamy mists inside belie the cool of the spring morning out.

“Bram made it to school on time,” I say.

“Thank you for letting me know,” she says, smiling at me. On the rare days when both she and my father have to go to work early, it is my responsibility to get Bram to his early train for First School. “Where are you going now? You have a few minutes left before work.”

“I might stop by to see Grandfather,” I say. It’s all right to deviate from the usual routine this way, because Grandfather’s Banquet is coming soon. So is mine. We have so many things to discuss.

“Of course,” she says. She’s transferring the seedlings from the tubes where they started, rowed in a tray, to their new homes, little pots filled with soil. She lifts one of the seedlings out.

“It doesn’t have many roots,” I say.

“Not yet,” she says. “That will come.”

I give her a quick kiss and start off again. I’m not supposed to linger at her workplace, and I have an air train to catch. Getting up early with Bram has given me a little extra time, but not much.

The spring wind is playful, pushing me one way, pulling me another. It spins some of last fall’s leaves up into the air, and I wonder, if I climbed up on the air-train platform and jumped, if the spiral of wind would catch me and take me up twirling.

I cannot think of falling without thinking of flying.

I could do it, I think, if I found a way to make wings.

Someone comes up next to me as I pass by the tangled world of the Hill on my way to the air-train stop. “Cassia Reyes?” the worker asks. The knees of her plainclothes are darkened with soil, like my mother’s when she’s been working. The woman is young, a few years older than me, and she has something in her hand, more roots dangling down. Pulling up or planting? I wonder.

“Yes?” I say.

“I need to speak with you,” she says. A man emerges from the Hill behind her. He is the same age as she is, and something about them makes me think, They would be a good Match. I’ve never had permission to go on the Hill, and I look back up at the riot of plants and forest behind the workers. What is it like in a place so wild?

“We need you to sort something for us,” the man says.

“I’m sorry,” I say, moving again. “I only sort at work.” They are not Officials, nor are they my superiors or supervisors. This isn’t protocol, and I don’t bend rules for strangers.

“It’s to help your grandfather,” the woman says.

I stop.

“There’s been a problem,” she says. “He may not be a candidate for tissue preservation after all.”

“That can’t be true,” I say.

“I’m afraid that it is,” the man says. “There’s evidence that he’s been stealing from the Society.”

I laugh. “Stealing what?” I ask. Grandfather has almost nothing in his apartment.

“The thefts occurred long ago,” the woman says, “when he worked at Restoration sites.”

The man holds out a datapod. It’s old, but the pictures on the screen are clear. Grandfather, younger, holding artifacts. Grandfather, burying the artifacts in a forested area. “Where is this?” I say.

“Here,” they say. “On the Hill.”

The pictures cover a span of many years. Grandfather ages as I scroll through them. He did this for a very, very long time.

“And the Society has only now found these pictures?” I ask.

“The Society doesn’t know,” the woman says. “We’d like to keep it that way, so he can still have his Banquet and his sample taken. We need you to help us in return. If you don’t, we’ll turn him in.”

I shake my head. “I don’t believe you,” I say. “These pictures—they could have been altered. You could have made all of this up.” But my heart pounds a little more quickly. I do not want Grandfather to get into trouble. And the thought of his sample is the only thing that makes the pain of the upcoming Banquet manageable.

“Ask your grandfather,” the man says. “He’ll tell you the truth. But you don’t have much time. The sort we need help with happens today.”

“You have the wrong person,” I say. “I’m only in training. I don’t even have my final work assignment yet.”

I should ignore them completely, or report them to the Society. But they’ve unsettled me. What if they take their story—true or not—to the Society? Then a wild hope comes to mind: if they do, will the Society delay Grandfather’s Banquet while they investigate? Could we have a little more time? But then I realize that won’t happen. The Society will have the Banquet and take the sample as planned, and then if there’s enough evidence, they might decide to destroy it.

“We need you to add data to the sort,” the man says.

“That’s impossible to do,” I say. “When I work, I only sort existing data. I don’t enter anything new.”

“You don’t have to enter anything,” the woman says. “All you have to do is access an additional data set and transfer some of that data.”

“That’s also impossible,” I say. “I don’t have the correct passkeys. The only information I see is what I’ve been given.”

“We have a code that will allow you to pull more data,” the man says. “It will help you access the Society’s mainframe simultaneously as you’re sorting their information.”

I stand there, listening, as they tell me what they want me to do. When they finish, I feel strange and spinning, as though the wind did after all pick me up and set me turning. Is this really happening? Will I do what they’ve asked of me?

“Why did you pick me?” I ask.

“You fit all the criteria,” he says. “You’re assigned to the sort today.”

“Also, you’re one of the fastest,” the woman says. “And the best.” Then she says something else, something that sounds like, “And you’ll forget.”

After they finish explaining what they want me to do, I have very little free time left. But I still climb off at the stop near Grandfather’s apartment. I have to speak with him before I decide my course of action. And the people at the Arboretum are right. Grandfather will tell me the truth.

He’s out in the greenspace, and when he sees me, surprise and happiness cross his face. I smile back but I have no time to waste. “I have to go to work,” I say. “But there’s something I need to know.”

“Of course,” he says. “What is it?” His eyes are sharp and keen.

“Have you ever,” I ask him, “taken something that didn’t belong to you?”

He doesn’t answer me. I see a flicker of surprise in his eyes. I can’t tell if he’s surprised at the question or that I know to ask it. Then he nods.

“From the Society?” I whisper, so quietly I can barely hear myself.

But he understands. He reads the words on my lips. “Yes,” he says.

And looking at him, I know that he has more to tell me. But I don’t want to hear it. I’ve heard enough. If he admits even to this, then what they say could be true. His sample could be in danger.

“I’ll come back later,” I promise, and I turn and run down the path, under the red-bud trees.

Work is different today. Norah, my usual supervisor, is nowhere to be found, and I don’t recognize many of the people at the sorting center.

An Official takes charge of the room as soon as we are all in our places. “Today’s sort is slightly different,” he says. “It’s an exponential pairwise sort, using personal data from a subset of the Society.”

The people from the Arboretum were right. They said this was the kind of sort I’d do today. And they told me more than the Society does now. The woman at the Arboretum said that the data was for the upcoming Match Banquet. My Banquet. The Society should not be sorting this close to the Banquet. And the people from the Arboretum said that some of those who should be included in the Matching pool had been left out, on purpose, by the Society. These people’s data exists in the Society’s database, but isn’t going to be in the pool. If I do what the man and woman from the Arboretum ask, I will change that.

The man and woman said that these other people belong in the pool, that it’s unfair to leave them out. Just as it’s unfair to leave Grandfather out from having his sample preserved.

I’m doing it for Grandfather, but I’m also doing it for me. I want to have my real Match, with all the possibilities included.

When I access the additional data and nothing happens, no alarm sounds, I breathe a tiny inward sigh of relief. For myself, that I am not yet caught, and for whomever it is that I have put back into the pool.

The data is in numbers, so I don’t know their names or even what the numbers correspond to; I only know what’s ideal, which ones should go with the others, because the Official has told us what to look for. I’m not changing the procedure of the sort itself, just adding to the data pool.

The Society should have special sorters to do this, in Central. But they’re not using them, they’re using us. I wonder why. I think of the criteria the Arboretum workers said made me perfect for what they wanted me to do. Could the Society have used the same criteria? I’m fast, I’m good, and I’ll forget? What does that mean?

“Won’t they trace the sort back to me?” I asked the people at the Arboretum.

“No,” the woman said. “We’ve infiltrated the Matching logs and can reroute your selections so that it will substitute a false identification number instead of yours. If someone decides to investigate later, it will be as if you were never there at all.”

“But my supervisor will know me,” I protested.

“Your supervisor will not be present for this sort,” the man told me.

“And the Officials—”

The woman interrupted me. “The Officials won’t remember names or faces,” she said. “You’re machines to them. If we substitute a false identification code and a false picture, they won’t remember who was really there.”

And this, I realized, is why the Society doesn’t trust technology. It can be overridden and manipulated. Like people, whom the Society also does not trust.

“But the other sorters—” I began.

“Trust us,” the man said. “They won’t remember.”

We’ve finished at last.

I finally look up from the screen. For the first time, my eyes meet those of the other people who have been working on this sort. And I feel nervous. The man and woman from the Arboretum were wrong. Today has been different, out of the ordinary, for all of the sorters in this room. No matter what, I will remember the other workers here—that girl’s freckles, that man’s tired eyes. And they’ll remember me.

I’m going to get caught.

“Please,” says one of the male Officials at the front of the room, “remove your red tablets from the containers. Do not take the tablet until we come by to observe you.”

The room collectively draws a breath. But we all do as he says. I tap the tablet out into my palm. For years, I’ve heard rumors about the red tablet. But I never really thought I’d have to take it. What will happen when I do?

The Official stands in front of me. I hesitate, on the edge of panic.

“Now,” he says, and I drop the tablet into my mouth, and he watches me swallow it down.

There’s a faint taste of tears in my mouth and I am sitting on the air train home without having much recollection of how I got here or what has happened this day.

Something doesn’t feel right. But I know I have to go to Grandfather. I have to find him. That’s all I can think of. Grandfather. Is he all right?

“Where have you been?” he asks when I arrive.

“Work,” I say, because I know I came from there. But I feel out of focus; I’m not sure what exactly happened. Being here feels good, though. It is beautiful out.

It is a rare moment in spring when both buds on the trees and flowers on the ground are red. The air is cool and at the same time warm. Grandfather watches me, his eyes bright and determined.

“Do you remember what I said once about the green tablet?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “You said I was strong enough to go without it.”

“Greenspace, green tablet,” he says, quoting himself from that long ago day. “Green eyes on a green girl.”

“I’ll always remember that day,” I tell him.

“But you’re having a hard time remembering this one,” he says. His eyes are knowing, sympathetic.

“Yes,” I say. “Why?”

Grandfather doesn’t answer me, at least not outright. “They used to have a phrase for a truly memorable day,” he says instead. “A red-letter day. Can you remember that?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. I press my hands to my head. I feel foggy, not quite right. Grandfather’s face is sad, but determined. It makes me feel determined, too.

I look around again at the red buds, the flowers. “Or,” I say, something sharpening in me, “you could call it a red garden day.”

“Yes,” Grandfather says. “A red garden day. A day to remember.”

He leans closer. “It’s going to be hard to remember,” he says. “Even this, right now, won’t be clear later. But you’re strong. I know you can get it all back.”

And I have. Because of Grandfather. He tied the red garden day like a flag to my memory, the way Ky and I used to tie red strips of cloth to mark obstacles on the Hill.

Grandfather couldn’t give me back all of the memory, because I’d never told him what I’d done, but he could give me a part of it, could help me to know what I’d lost. A clue. The red garden day. I can build the rest back like stepping-stones to take me to the other side of forgetfulness, to find the memory on the other bank.

Grandfather believed in me, and he thought I could rebel. And I did, always, do little things, even though I believed in the Society, too. I think of how I made a game for Bram on his scribe when we were small. How angry I was when I swallowed that bite of cake at the Banquet. How Xander and I didn’t tell the Officials about his tablet container that day he lost it at the pool. How we broke the rules for Em when we gave her the green tablet.

From what I know now, I think it must have been the Rising who approached me. I did what they asked because they threatened Grandfather. I added people to the Matching pool. Back then, I didn’t know who those people were. I didn’t know they were Aberrations.

The Rising and the Society both used me, because they knew that I would forget. The Society knew I’d forget the sort and its proximity to the Match Banquet, and the Rising knew I could not betray them if I didn’t remember what I’d done. The Pilot even made mention of that when he was flying us to Endstone. “You’ve helped us before,” he said, “though you don’t remember it.”

But I remember now.

Why did the Rising have me add the Aberrations to the pool? Did the Rising hope that it would function as a kind of Reclassification for those who made it through? Or were they simply trying to disrupt the Society?

And why did the Society use me, and the other sorters, that day? Were the sorters in Central already beginning to fall ill with the Plague?

Another memory comes to the surface, tugged by this one.

I Matched another time, in Central.

That’s what happened that day when I found the paper where I’d written a single word—remember—in my sleeve. The Society was having trouble because of the Plague; they couldn’t keep up with the people going still . How long did the Society use people like me to sort for the Banquets and then give us the red tablets so that we’d forget the rush, the eleventh-hour aspect of it all?