I don’t know plants the way my mother does, so I’m not even sure what it is I dig up in the little courtyard of the medical center. It could be a weed, it could be a flower. But I think she’ll be happy with either—she just wants, needs, something to combat the sterility of her room and the emptiness of a world without my father.
I fold the foilware container I brought with me into a kind of cup, scoop the soil inside, and pull out the plant.
The roots dangle down, some thick, others so thin that the breeze goes through them as easily as it does the leaves. When I stand up, my knees are dusty, my hands are dark with dirt. I am bringing my mother a plant because there is no way I can bring my father back for her. I understand why people wanted the tubes; I am also desperate for something to hold on to.
And then, standing there with roots dripping dirt on my feet, the middle of the red garden day memory comes back to me. My mother, my father, Grandfather, his tissue sample, cottonwood seeds, flowers growing wild and made of paper, red buds folded up tight, the green tablet, Ky’s blue eyes, and suddenly I can follow Grandfather’s red garden day clue, I can take it and follow it up to leaves and branches and all the way down to the roots.
And I catch my breath with remembering . . .
Everything.
My mother’s hands are printed black with dirt, but I can see the white lines crossing her palms when she lifts up the seedlings. We stand in the plant nursery at the Arboretum; the glass roof overhead and the steamy mists inside belie the cool of the spring morning out.
“Bram made it to school on time,” I say.
“Thank you for letting me know,” she says, smiling at me. On the rare days when both she and my father have to go to work early, it is my responsibility to get Bram to his early train for First School. “Where are you going now? You have a few minutes left before work.”
“I might stop by to see Grandfather,” I say. It’s all right to deviate from the usual routine this way, because Grandfather’s Banquet is coming soon. So is mine. We have so many things to discuss.
“Of course,” she says. She’s transferring the seedlings from the tubes where they started, rowed in a tray, to their new homes, little pots filled with soil. She lifts one of the seedlings out.
“It doesn’t have many roots,” I say.
“Not yet,” she says. “That will come.”
I give her a quick kiss and start off again. I’m not supposed to linger at her workplace, and I have an air train to catch. Getting up early with Bram has given me a little extra time, but not much.
The spring wind is playful, pushing me one way, pulling me another. It spins some of last fall’s leaves up into the air, and I wonder, if I climbed up on the air-train platform and jumped, if the spiral of wind would catch me and take me up twirling.
I cannot think of falling without thinking of flying.
I could do it, I think, if I found a way to make wings.
Someone comes up next to me as I pass by the tangled world of the Hill on my way to the air-train stop. “Cassia Reyes?” the worker asks. The knees of her plainclothes are darkened with soil, like my mother’s when she’s been working. The woman is young, a few years older than me, and she has something in her hand, more roots dangling down. Pulling up or planting? I wonder.
“Yes?” I say.
“I need to speak with you,” she says. A man emerges from the Hill behind her. He is the same age as she is, and something about them makes me think, They would be a good Match. I’ve never had permission to go on the Hill, and I look back up at the riot of plants and forest behind the workers. What is it like in a place so wild?
“We need you to sort something for us,” the man says.
“I’m sorry,” I say, moving again. “I only sort at work.” They are not Officials, nor are they my superiors or supervisors. This isn’t protocol, and I don’t bend rules for strangers.
“It’s to help your grandfather,” the woman says.
I stop.
“There’s been a problem,” she says. “He may not be a candidate for tissue preservation after all.”
“That can’t be true,” I say.
“I’m afraid that it is,” the man says. “There’s evidence that he’s been stealing from the Society.”
I laugh. “Stealing what?” I ask. Grandfather has almost nothing in his apartment.
“The thefts occurred long ago,” the woman says, “when he worked at Restoration sites.”
The man holds out a datapod. It’s old, but the pictures on the screen are clear. Grandfather, younger, holding artifacts. Grandfather, burying the artifacts in a forested area. “Where is this?” I say.
“Here,” they say. “On the Hill.”
The pictures cover a span of many years. Grandfather ages as I scroll through them. He did this for a very, very long time.
“And the Society has only now found these pictures?” I ask.
“The Society doesn’t know,” the woman says. “We’d like to keep it that way, so he can still have his Banquet and his sample taken. We need you to help us in return. If you don’t, we’ll turn him in.”
I shake my head. “I don’t believe you,” I say. “These pictures—they could have been altered. You could have made all of this up.” But my heart pounds a little more quickly. I do not want Grandfather to get into trouble. And the thought of his sample is the only thing that makes the pain of the upcoming Banquet manageable.
“Ask your grandfather,” the man says. “He’ll tell you the truth. But you don’t have much time. The sort we need help with happens today.”
“You have the wrong person,” I say. “I’m only in training. I don’t even have my final work assignment yet.”
I should ignore them completely, or report them to the Society. But they’ve unsettled me. What if they take their story—true or not—to the Society? Then a wild hope comes to mind: if they do, will the Society delay Grandfather’s Banquet while they investigate? Could we have a little more time? But then I realize that won’t happen. The Society will have the Banquet and take the sample as planned, and then if there’s enough evidence, they might decide to destroy it.
“We need you to add data to the sort,” the man says.
“That’s impossible to do,” I say. “When I work, I only sort existing data. I don’t enter anything new.”
“You don’t have to enter anything,” the woman says. “All you have to do is access an additional data set and transfer some of that data.”
“That’s also impossible,” I say. “I don’t have the correct passkeys. The only information I see is what I’ve been given.”
“We have a code that will allow you to pull more data,” the man says. “It will help you access the Society’s mainframe simultaneously as you’re sorting their information.”
I stand there, listening, as they tell me what they want me to do. When they finish, I feel strange and spinning, as though the wind did after all pick me up and set me turning. Is this really happening? Will I do what they’ve asked of me?
“Why did you pick me?” I ask.
“You fit all the criteria,” he says. “You’re assigned to the sort today.”
“Also, you’re one of the fastest,” the woman says. “And the best.” Then she says something else, something that sounds like, “And you’ll forget.”
After they finish explaining what they want me to do, I have very little free time left. But I still climb off at the stop near Grandfather’s apartment. I have to speak with him before I decide my course of action. And the people at the Arboretum are right. Grandfather will tell me the truth.
He’s out in the greenspace, and when he sees me, surprise and happiness cross his face. I smile back but I have no time to waste. “I have to go to work,” I say. “But there’s something I need to know.”
“Of course,” he says. “What is it?” His eyes are sharp and keen.
“Have you ever,” I ask him, “taken something that didn’t belong to you?”
He doesn’t answer me. I see a flicker of surprise in his eyes. I can’t tell if he’s surprised at the question or that I know to ask it. Then he nods.
“From the Society?” I whisper, so quietly I can barely hear myself.
But he understands. He reads the words on my lips. “Yes,” he says.
And looking at him, I know that he has more to tell me. But I don’t want to hear it. I’ve heard enough. If he admits even to this, then what they say could be true. His sample could be in danger.
“I’ll come back later,” I promise, and I turn and run down the path, under the red-bud trees.
Work is different today. Norah, my usual supervisor, is nowhere to be found, and I don’t recognize many of the people at the sorting center.
An Official takes charge of the room as soon as we are all in our places. “Today’s sort is slightly different,” he says. “It’s an exponential pairwise sort, using personal data from a subset of the Society.”
The people from the Arboretum were right. They said this was the kind of sort I’d do today. And they told me more than the Society does now. The woman at the Arboretum said that the data was for the upcoming Match Banquet. My Banquet. The Society should not be sorting this close to the Banquet. And the people from the Arboretum said that some of those who should be included in the Matching pool had been left out, on purpose, by the Society. These people’s data exists in the Society’s database, but isn’t going to be in the pool. If I do what the man and woman from the Arboretum ask, I will change that.
The man and woman said that these other people belong in the pool, that it’s unfair to leave them out. Just as it’s unfair to leave Grandfather out from having his sample preserved.
I’m doing it for Grandfather, but I’m also doing it for me. I want to have my real Match, with all the possibilities included.
When I access the additional data and nothing happens, no alarm sounds, I breathe a tiny inward sigh of relief. For myself, that I am not yet caught, and for whomever it is that I have put back into the pool.
The data is in numbers, so I don’t know their names or even what the numbers correspond to; I only know what’s ideal, which ones should go with the others, because the Official has told us what to look for. I’m not changing the procedure of the sort itself, just adding to the data pool.
The Society should have special sorters to do this, in Central. But they’re not using them, they’re using us. I wonder why. I think of the criteria the Arboretum workers said made me perfect for what they wanted me to do. Could the Society have used the same criteria? I’m fast, I’m good, and I’ll . . . forget? What does that mean?
“Won’t they trace the sort back to me?” I asked the people at the Arboretum.
“No,” the woman said. “We’ve infiltrated the Matching logs and can reroute your selections so that it will substitute a false identification number instead of yours. If someone decides to investigate later, it will be as if you were never there at all.”