“No,” I whisper.
This can’t be true. I am immune. I have to be.
Deep down, I believed in my immunity. I thought I would be like Ky, like Xander and Indie. After all, I have conquered the other two tablets. I walked through the blue tablet in the Carving, even though it was supposed to stop me cold. And I’ve never once taken the green.
The sorting part of my mind tells me: You were wrong. You are not immune. Now you know.
If I’m not immune, then what have I forgotten? Lost forever?
My mouth tastes like tears. I run my tongue over my teeth, feeling to see if there’s any trace of tablet left. Calm down. Think of what I remember.
My most recent memory before the air train is of leaving the sorting center. But why was I there so late? I shift and feel something under my plainclothes, something besides the poems. The red dress. I’m wearing it. Why?
Because Ky is coming tonight. I remember that.
I put my hand over my pounding heart and feel the whisper of paper underneath.
And I remember that I have poems to trade and that I carry them next to my skin.
I know how these papers came to me, back when I first got here. I remember it perfectly.
A few days after my arrival in Central, I walked along the edge of the white barrier circling the stillzone. For a moment I pretended that I was back in the Carving; that the barrier was one of the canyon walls and that the windows that lined the apartment buildings all the way up were the caves in the Outer Provinces; crevices in the stone of the canyon where people could hide, live, paint.
But, I realized as I walked, the outside surfaces of the apartments are so slick and same that even Indie couldn’t find a hold on the walls.
The lawns of the greenspaces were covered in snow. The air felt like it did back in Oria in winter, thick and cold. The fountain in the middle of one of the greenspaces had a marble sphere balancing on a pedestal. A Sisyphus fountain, I thought, and I told myself, I need to be gone by spring, by the time the water runs over it again.
I thought about Eli. This is his city, where he came from. I wonder if he feels about it the way I do about Oria; that, in spite of all that has happened, it’s still home. I remembered watching Eli go toward the mountains with Hunter, the two of them hoping to find the farmers who had avoided the Society for so long.
I wondered if the barricade was up when he lived here.
And I missed him almost as much as I missed Bram.
The branches above me were dry, dead, their fingers unleaved and bare. I reached up and snapped one down.
I listened. For something. For some sound of life in that quiet circle. But there were no sounds, really, beyond the ones that can’t be stilled—like wind in trees.
But I realize that told me nothing.
In the Society, we don’t call out beyond our own bodies, the walls of our rooms. When we scream it is only in the world of our own dreams, and I have never been sure who hears.
I glanced over to make sure that no one was watching, and then I bent down and in the snow near the wall I wrote an E for Eli’s name.
When I finished, I wanted more.
These branches will be my bones, I thought, and the paper will be my heart and skin, the places that feel everything. I broke more branches into pieces: a shinbone, a thighbone, arm bones. They had to be in segments so they would move when I did. I slid them up into the legs of my plainclothes and down into my sleeves.
Then I stood up to move.
It’s a strange feeling, I thought, like my bones are walking along with me on the outside of my body.
“Cassia Reyes,” someone said behind me.
I turned around in surprise. A woman looked back at me, her features unremarkable. She wore a standard-issue gray coat, like mine, and her hair and eyes were brown or gray; it was hard to say. She looked cold. I couldn’t tell how long she’d been watching me.
“I have something that belongs to you,” she said. “It was sent in from the Outer Provinces.”
I didn’t answer. Ky had taught me that sometimes silence was best.
“I cannot guarantee your safety,” the woman said. “I can only guarantee the authenticity of the items. But if you come with me, I’ll take you to them.”
She stood up and began walking. In moments she’d be out of sight.
So I followed her. When she heard me coming, she slowed down and let me catch up. We walked, not speaking, along streets and past buildings, beyond the edges of the pools of light from the streetlamps and then to a snarled wire fence enclosing an enormous grassy field, pitted with rubble. Ghostly white plastic coverings on the ground billowed and breathed in and out with the passing breeze.
She ducked through a gap in the fence and I did, too.
“Stay close,” she said. “This field is an old Restoration site. There are holes everywhere.”
As I followed her, I realized with excitement where I must be going. To the Archivists’ real hiding place, not the Museum where they did superficial, surface trading. I was going to the place where the Archivists must store things, where they themselves went to exchange poems and papers and information and who knew what else. As I skirted the holes in the ground and listened to the wind rustle the plastic coverings, I knew that I should be afraid, and somewhere deep inside, I was.
“You’re going to have to wear this,” the woman said, once we were in the middle of the field. She pulled out a dark piece of fabric. “I need to tie it over your eyes.”
I cannot guarantee your safety.
“All right,” I said, and turned my back to her.
When she was finished tying the cloth, she held me by the shoulders. “I’m going to spin you around,” she said.
A little laugh escaped me. I couldn’t help it. “Like a game from First School,” I said, remembering when we covered our eyes with our hands and played children’s games on the lawns of the Borough during leisure hours.
“A little bit like that,” she agreed, and then she spun me, and the world whirled around me dark and chill and whispering. I thought of Ky’s compass then, with its arrow that could always tell you where north was no matter how often you turned, and I felt the familiar sharp pain that I always had when I thought of the compass, and how I traded his gift away.
“You’re very trusting,” she said.
I didn’t answer. Back in Oria, Ky had told me that Archivists were no better or worse than anyone else, so I wasn’t certain I could trust her, but I felt that I had to take the risk. She held my arm and I walked with her, lifting my feet awkwardly, trying not to step on anything. The ground felt cold and hard under my feet but every now and then I felt the give of grass, something that had once been growing.