Matched

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 waterBirds 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.