Matched

I realize that I don’t need to hear it; I don’t need to hear anything she has to say or any predictions she thinks she can make. They do not know that Xander hid the artifact, that Ky can write, that Grandfather gave me poetry.

What else doesn’t she know?

“You say you planned this al along,” I say suddenly, on instinct, acting as though I want to be certain. “You’re tel ing me you put Ky into the Matching pool yourselves.”

“Yes,” she answers. “We did.”

This time, I look right at her when she speaks and that’s when I see it. The faintest twitch of muscle in her jaw, a slight shift of her eyes, the smal est ring of performance in the tone of her voice. She doesn’t often have to lie; she’s never been an Aberration, so this doesn’t come easily to her, she hasn’t had as much practice. She can’t keep her face perfectly stil the way Ky does when he’s playing a game and he knows what he has to do, whether it’s better to win or lose.

And although she’s been told how to play, she doesn’t know exactly which cards she’s holding.

She doesn’t know who put Ky into the Matching pool.

If the Officials didn’t, who did?

I look at her again. She doesn’t know, and she isn’t listening to her own words. If the almost-impossible happened before—my being Matched to two boys I already knew—then it can happen again.

I can find him.

I stand up to leave. I think I smel rain in the air, even though there isn’t a cloud in the sky, and I remember. I stil have a piece of Ky’s story left.

CHAPTER 31

Xander sits on the steps of my house.

It’s a familiar place for him to be in the summer, and his position looks familiar, too. Legs outstretched, elbows resting on the step behind him.

The shadow he casts in the summer sun is smal er than he is, a darker, compacted version of Xander next to the real one.

He watches me as I walk up the path, and when I get close, I see the pain stil there in his eyes, a shadow behind the blue.

I almost wish the red tablet had wiped away more than the past twelve hours for Xander. That he didn’t remember what I told him, how much it ached. Almost. But not quite. Even though tel ing the truth has caused us both hurt, I don’t see how I could have given Xander anything different. It was al I had to give and he deserved to have it.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Xander says. “I heard about your family.”

“I was in the City,” I tel him.

“Come sit by me,” Xander says. I hesitate—does he mean this? Does he want me to sit by him, or is he helping me put on a show for whoever might be watching? Xander keeps looking up at me, waiting. “Please.”

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says, and then I know that he is. He’s in pain. I am, too. It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain we feel.

Not much time has passed since the Match Banquet, but we are different now, stripped of our fancy clothes, our artifacts, our belief in the Match System. I stand there, thinking about this. How much has changed. How little we knew.

“You always have to make me speak first, don’t you?” Xander asks, a hint of a smile on his face. “You always win our arguments in the end.”

“Xander,” I say, and I sit down and slide right next to him. His arm goes around me, and I put my head on his shoulder and he bends his head to rest on mine. I sigh, so deep it is almost a shudder, at the relief I feel. At how good this is, to be held like this. None of it is for the Society, watching, always. It is al real, for me. I wil miss him so much.

Neither of us says anything for a moment, as we look out at our street together one last time. I might come back, but I won’t live here again. Once you’ve been Relocated, you don’t return except to visit. Clean breaks are best. And I wil make the cleanest break of al , when I go to find Ky. That is the kind of Infraction that no one can overlook.

“I heard you leave tomorrow,” Xander says, and I nod, my head moving against his cheek. “I have to tel you something.”

“What is it?” I ask. I look ahead, feeling his shoulder move under the shirt of his plainclothes as he shifts position slightly, but I don’t move away.

What wil he tel me? That he can’t believe I betrayed him? That he wishes he’d been Matched with anyone but me? Those are the things I deserve to hear, but I don’t think he wil say them. Not Xander.

“I remember what happened this morning,” Xander whispers to me. “I know what real y happened to Ky.”

“How?” I sit upright, look at him.

“The red tablets don’t work on me,” he whispers, soft into my ear, so no one else can hear. He looks down the street, back toward the Markhams’ house. “They didn’t work on Ky, either.”

“What?” How is it that these two boys who are so different are connected in such unexpected, deep ways? Maybe we al are, I think, and we don’t know how to see it anymore. “Tel me.”