If I’m going to run to find Ky, it has to be soon.
Indie, one of the other girls in my cabin, pushes past me on her way to the sink. “Did you leave any hot water for the rest of us?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. She mutters something under her breath as she turns on the water and picks up the soap. A few girls stand in line behind her. Others sit expectantly on the edges of the bunks that line the room.
It’s the seventh day, the day the messages come.
Carefully, I untie the small sack from my belt. We each have one of these little bags and we are supposed to carry them with us at all times. The bag is full of messages; like most of the other girls, I keep the papers until they can’t be read anymore. They are like the fragile petals of the newroses Xander gave me when I left the Borough, which I have also saved.
I look at the old messages while I wait. The other girls do the same.
It doesn’t take long before the papers yellow around the edges and turn to decay — the words meant to be consumed and let go. My last message from Bram tells me that he works hard in the fields and is an exemplary student at school, never late to class, and it makes me laugh because I know he’s stretching the truth on that last count at least. Bram’s words also make tears come to my eyes — he says he viewed Grandfather’s microcard, the one from the gold box at the Final Banquet.
The historian reads a summary of Grand father’s life, and at the very end is a list of Grand father’s favorite memories, Bram writes. He had one for each of us. His favorite of me was when I said my first word and it was “more.” His favorite of you was what he called “the red garden day.”
I didn’t pay close attention to the viewing of the microcard on the day of the Banquet — I was too distracted by Grandfather’s final moments in the present to fully note his past. I always meant to look at the card again, but I never did, and I wish now that I had. Even more than that, I wish I remembered the red garden day. I remember many days sitting on a bench and talking with Grandfather among the red buds in the spring or the red newroses in the summer or the red leaves in the fall. That must be what he meant. Perhaps Bram left off an s—Grandfather remembered the red garden days, plural. The days of spring and summer and autumn where we sat talking.
The message from my parents seems full of elation; they had received the word that this next work camp rotation would be my last.
I can’t blame them for being glad. They believed enough in love to give me a chance to find Ky, but they are not sorry to see that chance end. I admire them for letting me try. It is more than most parents would do.
I shuffle the papers back behind each other, thinking of cards in games, thinking of Ky. What if I could get to him with this transfer, stay hidden on the air ship and drop myself like a stone from the sky down into the Outer Provinces?
If I did, what would he think if he saw me after all this time? Would he even recognize me? I know I look different. It’s not just my hands. In spite of the full meal portions, I’ve grown thinner from all the work. My eyes have shadows because I can’t sleep now, even though the Society doesn’t monitor our dreams here. Though it worries me that they don’t seem to care very much about us, I like the new freedom of sleeping without tags. I lie awake thinking about old and new words and a kiss stolen from the Society when they weren’t watching. But I try to fall asleep, I really do, because I see Ky best in my dreams.
The only time we can see people is when the Society allows it. In life, on the port, on a microcard. Once there was a time when the Society let its citizens carry around pictures of those they loved. If people were dead or had gone away, at least you remembered how they looked. But that hasn’t been allowed in years. And now the Society has even stopped the tradition of giving new Matches pictures of each other after their first face-to-face meeting. I learned that from one of the messages I didn’t keep — a notification from the Matching Department sent out to all those who had chosen to be Matched. It read, in part: Matching procedures are being streamlined for maximum efficiency and to increase optimal results.
I wonder if there have been other errors.
I close my eyes again, wishing I could see Ky’s face flash in front of me. But every image I conjure lately seems incomplete, blurring in different places. I wonder where Ky is now, what is happening to him, if he managed to hang onto the scrap of green silk I gave him before he left.
If he managed to hold on to me.
I take out something else, spread the paper open carefully on the bunk. A newrose petal comes out along with the paper, feeling like pages to my touch, its pink yellowing around the edges, too.
The girl assigned to the bunk next to me notices what I’m doing and so I climb back down to the bunk below. The other girls gather around, as they always do when I bring out this particular page. I can’t get in trouble for keeping this — after all, it’s not something illegal or contraband. It was printed from a regulation port. But we can’t print anything besides messages here, and so this scrap of art has become something valuable.
“I think this might be the last time we can look at it,” I say. “It’s falling to pieces.”
“I never thought to bring any of the Hundred Paintings,” Lin says, looking down.
“I didn’t think of it either,” I say. “Someone gave this to me.”
Xander did, back in the Borough, the day we said good-bye. It’s #19 of the Hundred Paintings—Chasm of the Colorado, by Thomas Moran — and I gave a report on it once in school. I said then that it was my favorite painting and Xander must have remembered that all those years. The picture frightened and thrilled me in some vague way — the sky was so spectacular, the land so beautiful and dangerous, so full of heights and depths. I was afraid of the vastness of a place like that. At the same time, I felt sorrow that I would never see it: green trees clinging to red rocks, blue and gray clouds floating and streaming, gold and dark over all of it.
I wonder if some of that longing came through in my voice when I spoke of the painting, if Xander noticed and remembered. Xander still plays the game in a subtle way. This painting is one of his cards. Now, when I see the painting or touch one of the newrose petals, I remember the way he felt so familiar and knew so much, and I ache for what I’ve had to let go.
I was right about this being the last time we could look at the picture. When I pick it up, it falls to pieces. We all sigh, at the same time, our combined exhalation moving the fragments on its breeze.
“We could go view the painting on the port,” I tell them. The one port in camp sits humming over in the main hall, large and listening.
“No,” says Indie. “It’s too late.”
It’s true; we’re supposed to stay in our cabin after dinner. “Tomorrow during breakfast, then,” I say.
Indie makes a dismissive gesture, turns her face away. She’s right. I don’t know why it’s not the same, but it isn’t. At first, I thought it was having the picture that made it special, but it’s not even that. It’s looking at something without being watched, without being told how to see. That’s what the picture has given us.
I don’t know why I didn’t carry around pictures and poems all the time before I came here. All that paper in the ports, all that luxury. So many carefully selected pieces of beauty and still we didn’t look at them enough. How did I not see that the color of the green near the canyon was so new you could almost feel the smoothness of the leaf, the stickiness like butterfly wings opening for the first time?