Matched

Looking out the window, I watch Bram waiting at the air-train stop. It’s not raining yet, but he jumps up and down on the metal steps to the platform. I smile to myself and hope no one tel s him to stop, because I know exactly what he’s doing. In the absence of real thunder, he’s making his own.

Ky is the only one walking toward the air-train platform when I go outside. The train to Second School has left and this next one goes into the City.

He must have to report to work when his leisure activities get canceled; no free hour or two for him. Watching Ky walk, his shoulders straight, his head up, it strikes me how lonely he must be. He’s spent so long blending into the crowd, and now they’ve separated him out again.

Ky hears me coming up behind him and turns around. “Cassia,” he says, sounding surprised. “Did you miss your train?”

“No.” I stop a few feet away, to give him his space if he wants it. “I’m taking this one. I’m going to visit my father. You know, since hiking was canceled.”

Ky lives in our Borough, so of course he knows the Officials visited us last night. He won’t say anything, though—no one wil . It’s not their business unless the Society says that it is.

I take another step toward the air-train stop, toward Ky. I expect him to move, to start up the stairs to the platform, but he doesn’t. In fact, he takes a step closer to me. The tree-spiked Hil of the Arboretum rises in the distance behind him, and I wonder if we wil ever hike there. The thunderstorm, stil a few miles away, rol s and rumbles gray and heavy across the sky. Ky looks up. “Rain,” he says, almost under his breath, and then he looks back at me. “Are you going to his office in the City?”

“No. I’m going past that. He’s working on a site out at the edge of Brookway Borough.”

“Can you make it out there and back in time for school?”

“I think so. I’ve done it before when he was working out that way.”

Against the clouds, Ky’s eyes seem lighter, reflecting the gray around them, and I have an unsettling thought: perhaps his eyes have no color.

They reflect what he wears, who the Officials tel him to be. When he wore brown, his eyes looked brown. Now that he wears blue, they look blue.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks me.

I tel him the truth. “The color of your eyes.”

My answer catches Ky off guard; but after a second he smiles. I love his smile; in it, I see a hint of the boy he was that day at the pool. Were his eyes blue then? I can’t remember. I wish I’d looked more closely.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask. I expect the shutters to close in as they always do: Ky wil give me some expected answer, like “I was thinking about what I need to do at work today” or “The activities for free-rec on Saturday night.”

But he doesn’t. “Home,” he says simply, stil looking at me.

The two of us hold each other’s gazes for a long, unembarrassed moment and I feel that Ky knows. I’m not sure what he knows—whether he knows me, or just something about me.

Ky says nothing more. He looks at me with those changeable eyes, those eyes that I thought were the color of earth but instead are the color of sky, and I look back. I think we have done more seeing the last two days than in al the years we have known each other.

The female announcer’s voice cuts through the silence: “Air train approaching.”

Neither of us speaks as we hurry up the metal steps to the platform together, racing the clouds in the distance. For now, we win, reaching the top as the air train slides to a stop in front of us. Together we climb on, joining groups of others in dark blue plainclothes and a few Officials here and there.

There aren’t two seats together. I find a seat first, and Ky sits across from me. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Someone, another worker, cal s out a greeting to him and Ky cal s back. The train is crowded and people pass between us, but I can watch him now and then in the gaps they leave. And it strikes me that this might be part of the reason I am going to see my father today; not just to destroy the paper, but to ride on this train with Ky.

We reach his stop first. He climbs off without looking back.

From the raised air-train platform, the rubble of the old library appears to be covered in enormous black spiders. The huge black incinerators spread their leglike tubes out across the bricks and over the edges into the basement of the library. The rest of the building has al been torn away.