Reached by Ally Condie Read Free Book Online Page B

trace of tablet left.
Calm down. Think of what I remember.
    My most recent memory before the air train is of leaving the sorting center. But why was I there so late? I shift and feel something under my plainclothes, something besides the poems.
The red dress.
I’m wearing it. Why?
    Because Ky is coming tonight. I remember that.
    I put my hand over my pounding heart and feel the whisper of paper underneath.
    And I remember that I have poems to trade and that I carry them next to my skin.
    I know how these papers came to me, back when I first got here. I remember it perfectly.

    A few days after my arrival in Central, I walked along the edge of the white barrier circling the stillzone. For a moment I pretended that I was back in the Carving; that the barrier was one of the canyon walls and that the windows that lined the apartment buildings all the way up were the caves in the Outer Provinces; crevices in the stone of the canyon where people could hide, live, paint.
    But
, I realized as I walked,
the outside surfaces of the apartments are so slick and same that even Indie couldn’t find a hold on the walls
.
    The lawns of the greenspaces were covered in snow. The air felt like it did back in Oria in winter, thick and cold. The fountain in the middle of one of the greenspaces had a marble sphere balancing on a pedestal.
A Sisyphus fountain,
I thought, and I told myself,
I need to be gone by spring, by the time the water runs over it again.
    I thought about Eli.
This is his city, where he came from. I wonder if he feels about it the way I do about Oria; that, in spite of all that has happened, it’s still home.
I remembered watching Eli go toward the mountains with Hunter, the two of them hoping to find the farmers who had avoided the Society for so long.
    I wondered if the barricade was up when he lived here.
    And I missed him almost as much as I missed Bram.
    The branches above me were dry, dead, their fingers unleaved and bare. I reached up and snapped one down.
    I listened. For something. For some sound of life in that quiet circle. But there were no sounds, really, beyond the ones that can’t be stilled—like wind in trees.
    But I realize that told me nothing.
    In the Society, we don’t call out beyond our own bodies, the walls of our rooms. When we scream it is only in the world of our own dreams, and I have never been sure who hears.
    I glanced over to make sure that no one was watching, and then I bent down and in the snow near the wall I wrote an
E
for Eli’s name.
    When I finished, I wanted more.
    These branches will be my bones,
I thought,
and the paper will be my heart
and skin, the places that feel everything.
I broke more branches into pieces: a shinbone, a thighbone, arm bones. They had to be in segments so they would move when I did. I slid them up into the legs of my plainclothes and down into my sleeves.
    Then I stood up to move.
    It’s a strange feeling,
I thought,
like my bones are walking along with me on the outside of my body
.
    “Cassia Reyes,” someone said behind me.
    I turned around in surprise. A woman looked back at me, her features unremarkable. She wore a standard-issue gray coat, like mine, and her hair and eyes were brown or gray; it was hard to say. She looked cold. I couldn’t tell how long she’d been watching me.
    “I have something that belongs to you,” she said. “It was sent in from the Outer Provinces.”
    I didn’t answer. Ky had taught me that sometimes silence was best.
    “I cannot guarantee your safety,” the woman said. “I can only guarantee the authenticity of the items. But if you come with me, I’ll take you to them.”
    She stood up and began walking. In moments she’d be out of sight.
    So I followed her. When she heard me coming, she slowed down and let me catch up. We walked, not speaking, along streets and past buildings, beyond the edges of the pools of light from the streetlamps and then to a snarled wire fence enclosing an enormous grassy field, pitted