Reached Read Free Page A

edges a tiny bit closer to her child. “It’s just,” she says, and her voice catches, “that he’s so
still.
”

CHAPTER 2
    CASSIA
    K y said he’d meet me tonight, by the lake.
    When I see him next, I’ll kiss him first.
    He’ll pull me so close that the poems I keep underneath my shirt, near my heart, will rustle, a sound so soft that only the two of us will hear. And the music of his heartbeat, his breathing, the cadence and timbre of his voice, will set me to singing.
    He will tell me where he has been.
    I will tell him where I want to go.
    I stretch out my arms to make sure that nothing shows underneath the cuffs of my shirt. The red silk of the dress I’m wearing slips neatly under the unflattering lines of my plainclothes. It’s one of the Hundred Dresses, possibly stolen, that came up in a trade. It was worth the price I paid—a poem—to have such a piece of color to hold up to the light and pull over my head, to feel so bright.
    I sort for the Society here in their capital of Central, but I have a job to do for the Rising, and I trade with the Archivists. On the outside, I’m a Society girl wearing plainclothes. But underneath, I have silk and paper against my skin.
    I have found that this is the easiest way to carry the poems; wrap them around my wrists, place them against my heart. Of course, I don’t keep all of the pages with me. I’ve found a place to hide most of them. But there are a few pieces I don’t ever like to be without.
    I open my tablet container. All the tablets are there: blue, green, red. And something else besides. A tiny scrap of paper, on which I’ve written the word
remember.
If the Society ever makes me take the red tablet, I’ll slip this up into my sleeve, and then I’ll know that they’ve made me forget.
    I can’t be the first to have done something like this. How many people out there know something they shouldn’t—not
what
they have lost, but that they
have
lost?
    And there’s a chance I won’t forget anything—that I’m immune like Indie, and Xander, and Ky.
    The Society thinks the red tablet
does
work on me. But they don’t know everything. According to the Society, I’ve never been in the Outer Provinces at all. I’ve never crossed through canyons or run down a river in the night with stars sprinkled overhead and a silver spray of water all around. As far as they know, I never left.

    “This is your story,” the Rising officer said to me before they sent me on into Central. “This is what you say when people ask where you’ve been.”
    He handed me a sheet of paper. I looked down at the printed words:
    The Officers found me in the forest in Tana, near my work camp. I don’t remember anything about my last evening and night there. All I know is that I ended up in the woods somehow.
    I looked back up. “We have an Officer who is prepared to corroborate your story and claim she found you in the woods,” he said.
    “And the idea is that I’d been given a red tablet,” I said. “To forget that I saw them take the other girls away on the air ships.”
    He nodded. “Apparently one of the girls caused a disturbance. They had to give red tablets to several others who woke up and saw her.”
    Indie,
I thought. She’s the one who ran and screamed. She knew what was happening to us.
    “So we’ll say that
you
went missing after that,” he said. “They lost track of you for a moment, and you wandered off while the red tablet was taking effect. Then they found you days later.”
    “How did I survive?” I asked.
    He tapped the paper in front of me.
    I was lucky. My mother had told me how to identify poisonous plants. So I foraged. In November, there are still plants on the ground that can be used for food.
    In a way, that part of the story was true. My mother’s words did come back to help me survive, but it was in the Carving, not in the forest.
    “Your mother worked in an Arboretum,” he said. “And you’ve been in the woods