Another thought crosses my mind: before he turned seventy and was required to quit work, Grandfather was an Official. But it’s different with Papa and Grandfather, I tel myself. Neither of them are, or were, high-level Officials in places like the Match Department or the Safety Department.
Those are the ones that do most of the Official-type things, like implement rules. We’re thinkers, not enforcers: learners, not doers.
Most of the time. My great-grandmother, an Official herself, did steal that poem.
My father glances once at the sky, aware of the impending thunderstorm. Speed is important, but they have to be methodical. “We can’t just set things on fire,” he’s told me. “The tubes are like the incineration devices at home. They record the amount and type of the matter destroyed.” There are a few piles of books left and, as I watch, the workers move from one to another, fol owing his orders. It’s faster to incinerate individual pages instead of books, so they slice the books open, gutting them along the spines, preparing them for the tubes.
My father looks at the sky again and gestures in a “hurry up” motion to the other workers. I need to get back to school, but I keep watching.
I’m not the only one. As I glance up, over across the chasm of spiders and books, I see another figure in white. An Official. Watching, too.
Checking on my father.
The site personnel drag the incineration tube to a newly readied pile. The books’ backs are broken; their bones, thin and delicate, fal out. The workers shove them toward the incineration tube; they step on them. The bones crackle under their boots like leaves. It reminds me of fal , when the City brings around the incineration equipment to our neighborhoods and we shovel the fal en maple leaves into the tubes. My mother always laments the waste, since decayed leaves can be good fertilizer, just as my father laments the waste of the paper that could be recycled when he has to incinerate a library. But the higher Officials say some things are not worth saving. Sometimes it’s faster and more efficient to destroy.
One leaf escapes. Caught on a swirl of wind from the impending thunderstorm, it rises up, almost reaching my feet as I stand near the edge of this smal canyon that was once a library. It hovers there, so close I can almost see the words written on it, and then the wind dies down for a moment and it fal s back.
I glance up. Neither Official watches me. Not my father, not the other. My father is intent on the books he’s destroying; the other Official is intent on my father. It’s time.
I reach into my pocket and pul out the paper Grandfather gave me. I let go of it.
It dances on the air for a moment before it fal s, too. A fresh gust of wind almost saves it, but a worker catches sight of it and lifts a tube up to suck the paper from the air, to suck the words from the sky.
I’m sorry, Grandfather.
I stand and watch until al the bones are shoved into the incineration tubes, until al the words have been turned into ash and nothing.
I lingered too long at the library work site and I’m almost late for class. Xander waits for me near the main doors of Second School.
He pushes one of them open, holding its weight with his shoulder. “Is everything al right?” he asks quietly as I stop there in the doorway.
“Hi, Xander,” someone cal s out to him. He nods in their direction, but doesn’t look away.
For a moment, I think that I should tel Xander everything. Not just about what happened last night with the Officials, which is what has him worried, but everything. I should tel him about Ky’s face on the screen. I should tel him about Ky in the woods, how he saw the poem. I should tel Xander about the poem itself and the way it felt to let it go. Instead, I shake my head. I don’t want to talk right now.
Xander changes the subject, his eyes lighting up. “I almost forgot. I have something to tel you. There’s a new Saturday activity coming up.”
“Real y?” I ask, grateful to him for understanding, for not pressing further. “Is there a new showing?”
“No, even better. We can replant the flower beds in front of First School and eat dinner outside. Like a—what’s the word?—like a picnic. There’s going to be ice cream afterward, too.”
The enthusiasm in Xander’s voice makes me smile a little. “Xander, that’s nothing but a glorified work project. They want some free labor and they’re bribing us with ice cream.”
He grins at me. “I know, but it’s good to have a break. Keeps me fresh for the games the next time. So you want to plant, too, right? I know the spots wil fil up fast, so I signed you up already in case you did.”
A tiny bit of annoyance that he did this without talking to me first flashes through me, but it vanishes almost instantly when I notice that his smile seems a little awkward. He knows he’s crossed a line—he never would have done something like this before we were Matched—and the fact that he worries about it makes it al right. Besides, even though it is a glorified work project, I would have signed up in a heartbeat myself. Xander knows that. He knows me and he looks out for me.
“That’s fine,” I tel Xander. “Thanks.” He lets go of the door and we walk into the hal together. In the back of my mind I find myself wondering what Ky wil do that night. They don’t tel you about free-rec options at work. By the time he gets home and finds out about it, the spots wil likely be ful because of the newness of the activity and because of the ice cream. We could sign him up, though. I could walk over to one of the ports here at the school and . . .
Time’s up. The chime rings over the speakers in the hal .
Xander and I duck through the classroom door, slide into our desks and take out our readers and scribes. Piper usual y sits next to us in Applicable Sciences, but I don’t see her. “Where’s Piper?”
“I meant to tel you. She got her final work position today.”
“She did? What is it?”
But the chime rings again and I have to face front and wait to find out until after class. Piper has her vocation! A few people get them early, like Ky, but the rest of us receive them at some point during the year after our seventeenth birthday. One by one we get picked off until everyone is gone and there’s no one left in our year at Second School.
I hope Xander and Em don’t get cal ed for a long time. It wouldn’t be the same here without them, especial y without Xander. I glance over at him.
He gazes at the instructor as though this is al he wants to do in the world. His fingers tap on the scribe; he jiggles one foot impatiently, always ready to know more. It’s hard to keep up with him—he’s so smart, he learns so fast. What if he moves on soon to his vocation and leaves me behind?