“The warning isn’t for you,” my mother says. “It’s for someone else.”
My father puts his hands on my mother’s shoulders and it is as though they are alone, the way he looks at her. “Mol y, I promise. I didn’t ...” And at the same time, I open my mouth to say something—I don’t know what—something about what I have done and how this is al my fault. But before my father can finish and I can begin, my mother speaks.
“It’s a warning for me.”
She turns and goes back into the house, brushing a hand across her eyes. As I watch her go, the guilt slices quick through me like the cuts in the tree.
I don’t think the warning is for my mother.
If the Officials truly can see my dreams, they should be happy with what I dreamed last night. I burned the last of Ky’s story in the incinerator, but afterward I kept thinking of what it showed, what it told me: The sun was red and low in the sky when the Officials came to get him.
So then, when I dreamed, I saw scene after scene of Ky surrounded by Officials in their white uniforms with a red sky behind him, a glimpse of sun waiting on the horizon. Whether it was rising or setting, I could not tel ; I had no sense of direction in the dream. In each dream he did not show any fear. His hands did not shake; his expression remained calm. But I knew he was afraid, and when the red light of the sun hit his face it looked like blood.
I do not want to see this scene played out in real life. But I have to know more. How did he escape last time? What happened?
The two desires struggle within me: the desire to be safe, and the desire to know. I cannot tel which one wil win.
My mother hardly speaks as we ride the train to the Arboretum together. She looks over at me and smiles now and then, but I can tel she’s deep in thought. When I ask her questions about her trip, she answers careful y, and final y I stop.
Ky rides the same air train we do, and he and I walk together toward the Hil . I try to act friendly but reserved—the way we once were around each other—even though I want to touch his hand again, to look in his eyes and ask him about the story. About what happened next.
It only takes a few seconds in the forest before I lose control and I have to ask him. I put my hand on his arm as we fol ow our path to the spot where we last marked. When I touch him he smiles at me, and it warms my heart and makes it hard to take my hand away, to let go. I don’t know if I can do this, despite wanting him to be safe even more than I want him.
“Ky. An Official contacted me yesterday. She knows about us. They know about us.” Ky nods. “Of course they do.”
“Did they talk to you, too?”
“They did.”
For someone who has spent his entire life avoiding attention from the Officials, he seems remarkably composed about this. His eyes are deep as ever but there is a calm there that I haven’t seen before.
“Aren’t you worried?”
Ky doesn’t answer. Instead, he reaches into the pocket of his shirt and pul s out a paper. He hands it to me. It’s different from the brown paper of napkins and wrappings that he’s been using—whiter, smoother. The writing on it is not his own. It’s from some kind of port or scribe, but something about it seems foreign.
“What is this?” I ask.
“A late birthday present for you. A poem.”
My jaw drops—a poem? How?—and Ky hurries to reassure me. “Don’t worry. We’l destroy the paper soon so we don’t get in trouble. It won’t take long to memorize.” His face is alight with happiness and I suddenly realize that Ky looks the slightest bit like Xander, with his face open and joyful like this. I am reminded of the shifting faces on the portscreen the day after I got my Match, when I saw Xander, then Ky. But now, I see only Ky.
Only Ky and no one else.
A poem. “Did you write it?”
“No,” he says, “but it’s by the same man who wrote the other poem. Do not go gentle.”
“How?” I ask him. There were no other poems by Dylan Thomas in the port at school.
Ky shakes his head, evading my question. “It’s not the whole thing. I could only afford part of a stanza.” Before I can ask what he gave in exchange for the poem, he clears his throat a little nervously and looks down at his hands. “I liked it because it mentions a birthday and because it reminds me of you. How I felt when I saw you that first day, in the water at the pool.” He looks confused and I see a trace of sadness on his face. “Don’t you like it?”
I hold the white paper, but my eyes are so blurred with tears that I can’t read it. “Here,” I say, thrusting the poem back at him. “Wil you read it to me?” I turn away and start walking through the trees, staggering almost, so blinded am I by the beauty of his surprise and so overwhelmed by possibility and impossibility.
Behind me, I hear Ky’s voice. I stop and listen.
My birthday began with the water—
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
I begin walking again, not bothering with cairns or cloths or anything that might slow me down. I’m careless and I disturb a group of birds, which flutters up and away from us into the sky. White on blue, like the colors of City Hal . Like the colors of angels.
“They’re flying your name,” Ky says from behind me.
I turn around and I see him standing in the forest, the white poem in his hand.
The birds’ cries fly away on the air with them. In the quiet that fol ows I don’t know who moves first, Ky or me, but soon there we are, standing close but not touching, breathing in but not kissing.
Ky leans toward me, his eyes holding mine, near enough that I can hear the slight crackle of the poem as he moves.
I close my eyes as his lips touch warm on my cheek. I think of the cottonwood seeds brushing against me that day on the air train. Soft, light, ful of promise.
CHAPTER 24
Ky gives me three gifts for my birthday. A poem, a kiss, and the hopeless, beautiful belief that things might work. When I open my eyes, as I put my hand up to the place on my cheek where his lips touched, I say, “I didn’t give you anything on your birthday, I don’t even know when it is.” And he says, “Don’t worry about that,” and I say, “What can I do?” and he answers, “Let me believe in this, al of this, and you believe it, too.” And I do.