Reached Read Free Page B

before.”
    “Yes,” I said. It was the forest on the Hill, not the one in Tana; but hopefully it would be close enough.
    “Then it all adds up,” he said.
    “Unless the Society questions me too closely,” I said.
    “They won’t,” he said. “Here’s a silver box and a tablet container to replace the ones you lost.”
    I took them from him and opened the tablet container. One blue tablet, one green. And one red, to replace the one I’d supposedly taken at an Official’s command in Tana. I thought about those other girls who really did take the tablet; most wouldn’t remember Indie, how she cried out. She’d have disappeared. Like me.
    “Remember,” he said, “you can recall finding yourself alone in the forest and the time you spent foraging for food. But you’ve forgotten everything that
really
happened in the twelve hours before you went on the air ship.”
    “What do you want me to do once I’m in Central?” I asked him. “Why did they tell me I could best serve the Rising from within the Society?”
    I could see him sizing me up, deciding if I really
could
do whatever it is that he wanted. “Central is where the Society planned to send you for your final work position,” he said. I nodded. “You’re a sorter. A good one, according to the Society’s data. Now that they think you’ve been rehabilitated in the work camp, they’ll be glad to have you back, and the Rising can make use of that.” And then he told me what kind of sort to look for, and what I should do when it happened. “You’ll need to be patient,” he said. “It may take some time.”
    Which was a wise piece of advice, it seems, since I haven’t sorted anything out of the ordinary yet. Not that I remember, anyway. But that’s all right. I don’t need the Rising to tell me how to fight the Society.
    Whenever I can, I write letters. I’ve made them in many ways: a
K
out of strands of grass; an
X
with two sticks crossed over each other, their wet bark black against a silvery metal bench in the greenspace near my workplace. I set out a little ring of stones in the shape of an
O
, like an open mouth, on the ground. And of course I write the way Ky taught me, too.
    Wherever I go, I look to see if there are new letters. So far, no one else is writing, or if they are, I haven’t seen it. But it will happen. Maybe even now there’s someone charring sticks the way Ky told me he did, preparing to write the name of someone they love.
    I
know
that I’m not the only one doing these things, committing small acts of rebellion. There are people swimming against the current and shadows moving slowly in the deep. I have been the one looking up when something dark passed before the sun. And I have been the shadow itself, slipping along the place where earth and water meet the sky.
    Day after day, I push the rock that the Society has given me up the hill, over and over again. Inside me are the real things that give me strength—my thoughts, the small stones of my own choosing. They tumble in my mind, some polished from frequent turning, some new and rough, some that cut.

    Satisfied that the poems don’t show, I walk down the hallway of my tiny apartment and into the foyer. I’m about to open the door when a knock sounds on the other side of it, and I start a little. Why would anyone be here now? Like many of the others who have a work assignment but who have not yet celebrated their Marriage Contract, I live alone. And, just like in the Boroughs, we aren’t encouraged to visit one another’s residences.
    An Official stands at the door, smiling pleasantly. There’s only one, which is strange. Officials almost always travel in groups of three. “Cassia Reyes?” she asks.
    “Yes,” I say.
    “I’ll need you to come with me,” she says. “You’re required at the sorting center for extra work hours.”
    But I’m supposed to see Ky tonight.
It seemed that things were, at last, aligning for us—he was finally assigned to come to