Matched

My mother presses her lips tightly together and her eyes flash, but her anger is not for my father. She is mad at the Officials for making him feel worse than he already does.

Even though there is nothing to say, the Officials do not leave. A few moments of cold silence pass during which no one says anything and we al think about how nothing can save Grandfather now.

A chime sounds in the kitchen; our dinner has arrived. My mother walks out of the room. I hear the sounds of her taking the food delivery and placing it on the table. When she walks back into the room, her shoes make stabbing, serious sounds on the wood floor. She means business.

“It’s mealtime,” she says, looking at the Officials. “I’m afraid they haven’t sent any extra portions.”

The Officials bristle a little. Is she trying to dismiss them? It’s hard to tel . Her face seems open, her tone regretful but firm. And she’s so lovely, blond hair winding down her back, flushed cheeks. None of that is supposed to matter. But somehow, it does.

And besides. Even the Officials don’t dare disrupt mealtime too much. “We’l report this,” the tal est one says. “I’m sure that a citation of the highest order wil be issued, with the next error resulting in a complete Infraction.”

My father nods; my mother glances back at the kitchen, to remind them that the food is here and getting cold, possibly losing nutrients. The Officials nod curtly at us and, one by one, they leave, walking through the foyer, past the port, out the only door in the house.

After they depart our whole family sighs with relief. My father turns to us. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.” He looks at my mother and waits for her to speak.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says bravely. She knows that my father now has a mistake logged against him in the permanent database. She knows that it means Grandfather is gone. But she loves my father. She loves him too much, I sometimes think. I think it now. Because if she isn’t angry with him, how can I be?

When we sit down to dinner my mother embraces him and leans her head on his shoulder for a moment before she hands him his foilware. He reaches up to touch her hair, her cheek.

Watching them, I think to myself that someday something like this might happen to me and to Xander. Our lives wil be so intertwined that what one of us does wil affect the other down to the ends, like the tree my mother transplanted once at the Arboretum. She showed it to me when I came to visit her. It was a little thing, a baby tree, but stil it tangled with things around it and required care to move. And when she final y pul ed it out, its roots stil clung to the earth from its old home.

Did Ky do that, when he came here? Did he bring anything with him? It would have been difficult; they would have searched him so careful y, he had to adapt so quickly. Stil , I don’t see how he couldn’t bring something. Secret, maybe, inside, intangible. Something to nourish him. Something of home.

Feet pounding, fists clenched, I hit the tracker running.

I wish I could run outside, away from the sadness and shame in my house. Sweat trickles down the front of my gymgear, through my hair, across my face. I brush it away and glance back down at the tracker screen.

There’s a rise in the curve on the tracker screen: a simulated hil . Good. I’ve reached the peak of the workout, the most difficult part, the fastest part. The tracker spins below me, a machine named for the circular tracks where people used to compete. And named for what it does—tracking information about the person running on it. If you run too far, you might be a masochist, an anorexic, or another type, and you wil have to see an Official of Psychology for diagnosis. If it’s determined that you are running hard because you genuinely like it then you can have an athletic permit. I have one.

My legs ache a little; I look straight ahead and wil myself to see Grandfather’s face within my mind, to hold it there. If there’s real y no chance for him to ever come back, then I am the one who has to keep him alive.

The incline increases, and I keep pace, wishing for the feeling of climbing the hil earlier that day when we were hiking. Outside. Branches and bushes and mud and sunlight on the top of a hil with a boy who knows more than he wil say.

The tracker beeps. Five minutes left before the workout ends, before I’ve run the distance and time I should in order to keep up my optimal heart rate and maintain my optimal body mass index. I have to be healthy. It’s part of what makes us great, what keeps our life span long.

Al of the things that were shown in early studies to be good for longevity—happy marriages, healthy bodies—are ours to have. We live long, good lives. We die on our eightieth birthdays, surrounded by our families, before dementia sets in. Cancer, heart disease, and most debilitating il nesses are almost entirely eradicated. This is as close to perfect as any society has ever managed to get.