“Who’s Sisyphus?” I ask, trying to think of something to distract him. “You mentioned his name once. When the Officer told us that we were going to start coming to the Hil .”
“Someone whose story has been told for a long time.” Ky stands up and starts walking again. I can tel that he needs to keep moving today. “It was one of my father’s favorite stories to tel . I think he wanted to be like Sisyphus, because Sisyphus was crafty and sneaky and always causing trouble for the Society and the Officials.”
Ky’s never talked about his father before. Ky’s voice sounds flat; I can’t tel from his tone how he feels about the man who died years ago, the man whose name Ky held in his hand in the picture.
“There’s a story about how Sisyphus once asked an Official to show him how a weapon worked and then he turned it on the Official.” I must look shocked, but Ky seems to have anticipated my surprise. His eyes are kind as he explains. “It’s an old story, from back when the Officials carried weapons. They don’t use them anymore.”
What he doesn’t say, but what we both know, is They don’t have to. The threat of Reclassification is enough to keep almost everyone in line.
Ky turns back, pushes his way ahead. I watch him move, the muscles in his back inches away from me; I fol ow close so that I can slip through the branches he holds back for me. The smel of the forest seems, for a moment, to be simply the smel of him. I wonder what sage smel s like, the smel he said was his favorite in his old life. I hope that the smel of this forest is his favorite now. I know it is mine.
“The Society decided that they needed to give Sisyphus a punishment, a special one, because he dared to think he could be as clever as one of them, when he wasn’t an Official, or even a citizen. He was nothing. An Aberration from the Outer Provinces.”
“What did they do to him?”
“They gave him a job. He had to rol a rock, a huge one, to the top of a mountain.”
“That doesn’t sound so terrible.” There’s relief in my voice. If the story ends wel for Sisyphus, maybe it can end wel for Ky.
“It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. As he was about to reach the top, the rock rol ed back to the bottom and he had to start again. That happened every time. He never got the rock to the top. He went on pushing forever.”
“I see,” I say, realizing why our hikes on the little hil reminded Ky of Sisyphus. Day after day we did the same thing: climbed back up and came back down. “But we did make it to the top of the little hil .”
“We were never al owed to stay there for long,” Ky points out.
“Was he from your Province?” I stop for a moment, thinking I’ve heard the Officer’s whistle, but it’s merely a shril birdcal from the canopy of leaves above us.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s real,” Ky says. “If he ever existed.”
“Then why tel his story?” I don’t understand, and for a second I feel betrayed. Why did Ky tel me about this person and make me feel empathy for him when there’s no proof that he ever lived at al ?
Ky pauses for a moment before he answers, his eyes wide and deep like the oceans in other tales or like the sky in his own. “Even if he didn’t live his story, enough of us have lived lives just like it. So it’s true anyway.”
I think about what Ky said while we move again, quickly, tying off areas and helping each other around and through the tangled parts of the forest.
There’s a smel here that I have smel ed before: a smel of decay, but it doesn’t seem rotten. It smel s almost rich, the scent of the plants returning to the earth, of wood giving way to dust.
But the Hil could be hiding something. I remember Ky’s words and pictures and I realize that no place is completely good. No place is completely bad. I’ve been thinking in terms of absolutes; first, I believed our Society was perfect. The night they came for our artifacts, I believed it was evil.
Now I simply don’t know.
Ky blurs the lines for me. He helps me see clearly, too. And I hope I do the same for him.
“Why do you throw the games?” I ask him as we pause in a smal clearing.
His face tightens. “I have to.”
“Every time? Don’t you even let yourself think about winning?”
“I always think about winning,” Ky tel s me. There’s fire in his eyes again, and he snaps a branch off a tree to make room for us to go through. He tosses the first branch to the side and holds another one back, waiting for me to pass, but I stay right there next to him. He looks down at me, shadows from the leaves crossing his face, and also sun. He’s looking at my lips, which makes it hard to speak, even though I know what I want to say.
“Xander knows you lose on purpose.”
“I know he does,” Ky says. A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth, like the one I thought I saw last night. “Any other questions?”
“Just one,” I say. “What color are your eyes?” I want to know what he thinks, how he sees himself—the real Ky—when he dares to look.
“Blue,” he says, sounding surprised. “They’ve always been blue.”
“Not to me.”
“What do they look like to you?” he says, puzzled, amused. Not looking at my mouth anymore, looking into my eyes.
“Lots of colors,” I say. “At first, I thought they were brown. Once I thought they were green, and another time gray. They are most often blue, though.”
“What are they now?” he asks. He widens his eyes a little, leans closer, lets me look as long and as deep as I want.
And there’s so much to see. They are blue, and black, and other colors, too, and I know some of what they’ve seen and what I hope they see now.
Me. Cassia. What I feel, who I am.
“Wel ?” Ky asks.
“Everything,” I tel him. “They’re everything.”
Neither of us moves for a moment, locked instead in each other’s eyes and in the branches of this Hil we might never finish climbing. I’m the one who moves first. I step past him and push my way through some more tangled leaves, climb over a smal fal en tree.
Behind me I hear Ky doing the same.
I’m fal ing in love. I am in love. And it’s not with Xander, although I do love him. I’m sure of that, as sure as I am of the fact that what I feel for Ky is something different.