Page 51 of Crossed (Matched 2)


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To my surprise, it’s not Hunter who speaks from ahead. It’s Ky’s voice from behind.

“It will be all right,” he says. “Push along a little more. ”

And even in my panic, I hear the music in his deep voice, the sounds of singing. I close my eyes, imagining my breath is his own, that he is with me.

“Wait a moment if you need to,” he says.

I picture myself smaller even than I am now. Climbing into the cocoon, pulling it tight around me like a real cloak, a blanket. And then I don’t imagine myself bursting out. I just stay tucked inside, trying to see what I can.

At first, nothing at all.

But then I feel it. Even hidden away in the dark, I can tell that it is there. Some small part of me is always, always free.

“But I will,” I say out loud.

“You will,” Ky says behind me, and I move, and then I can feel space above me, air to breathe, a place to stand.

Where are we?

Shapes and figures form in the darkness, lit by tiny blue lights along the floor of the cave that shine like small raindrops. But, of course, they are too orderly to have fallen.

Other lights illuminate tall clear cases and machines that hum and moderate the temperature within the stone walls. What I see before me is Society: calibration, organization, calculation.

Someone moves and I almost gasp before I remember. Hunter.

“It’s so huge,” I say to him, and he nods.

“We used to meet here,” he says softly. “We weren’t the first. The Cavern is an old place. ”

I shudder when I look up. The walls of the vast space are embedded with shells of dead animals and bones of beasts, all caught in stone that was once mud. This place existed before the Society. Perhaps before people lived at all.

Ky comes into the cave then, brushing dust from his hair, and I walk over to him, and touch his hands, which feel cold and rough but nothing like stone. “Thank you for helping me,” I say into the warmth of his neck. Then I pull away so he can see what’s here.

“It is Society,” Ky says, his voice as quiet as the Cavern. He strides across the floor of the cave and Hunter and I follow. Ky puts his hand on the door at the other side of the room. “Steel,” he says.

“They’re not supposed to be here,” Hunter says, his voice tight.

It feels wron

g: this overlay of the sterile and the Society over the earthy and the organic. The Society wasn’t supposed to be in my relationship with Ky, either, I think, remembering how my Official told me that they’d known all along. The Society slides in everywhere, snakes in a crack, water dripping against a rock until even the stone has no choice but to hollow and change shape.

“I have to know what they killed us for,” Hunter says to me, gesturing to the cases. They are filled with tubes. Rows and rows of them, glittering in the blue light. Beautiful as the sea, I imagine.

Indie comes into the cave next. She looks around and her eyes widen. “So what are they?” she asks.

“Let me look more closely,” I say, and I walk between two of the rows of tubes. Ky comes with me. I run my hand along the cases made of smooth, clear plastic. To my surprise, there are no locks on the doors, and I open one to get a better look. It makes a soft hiss as it opens and I gaze at the tubes in front of me, overwhelmed all at once by both the amount of sameness and the amount of choice.

I don’t want to disturb the tubes in case the Society has an alarm system, so I crane my neck until I can see the information on the tube in the center of the middle row. HANOVER, MARCUS. KA. The first notation is a name, clearly, and the second is the abbreviation for Keya Province. Beneath the Province, two dates and a bar code have been engraved.

These are samples of people, buried in the earth with the bones of creatures long dead and with the sediment of seas long stone, rows and rows of glass tubes similar to the one Grandfather had, the one containing his tissue preservation sample.

Behind the exhaustion and fatigue, I feel my sorting mind grind its gears, whir into action. Trying to make sense of what I see and the numbers in front of me. The cave is a place of preservation, accidental and intentional, in the mudded fossils above us and the tissues stored in tubes.

Why here? I wonder. Why so far on the edge of the Society? Surely there are better places, dozens of them. It is the opposite of a graveyard. It is the reverse of saying good-bye. And I understand this. Though I wish it didn’t, in some ways this makes more sense to me than putting people forever into the earth and letting them go the way the farmers do.

“They’re tissue samples,” I tell Ky. “But why would the Society store them here?” I shiver and Ky puts his arm around me.

“I know,” he says.

But he doesn’t.

The Carving doesn’t care.

We live, we die, we turn to rock or lie in earth or drift out to sea or burn to ash, and the Carving doesn’t care about any of it. We will come and go. The Society will come and go. The canyons will live on.

“You know what they are,” Hunter says. I look over at him. What must someone who has never lived in the Society think of something like this?

“Yes,” I say. “But I don’t know why. Wait a moment. Let me think. ”

“How many are in here?” Ky asks.

I do a quick estimation based on the rows in front of me. “There are thousands,” I say. “Hundreds of thousands. ” The tubes are small, row upon row, case upon case, aisle upon aisle, in the vast space of the Cavern. “But not enough to account for all the samples that must have been taken over the years. This can’t be the only facility. ”

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