Before They Choose

The first time I lied to a Matcher, I was twelve years old, and I didn't even know it was a lie.

Do you feel anything, when you look at him? the woman had asked, kneeling in front of me with her clipboard and her kind, tired eyes, gesturing at Rowan Ashby across the schoolyard. He was eating dirt on a dare. I was seven months from losing my first tooth.

"No," I'd said, and it was true, and the Matcher had smiled and written something down, and that was the last time in my life a Matcher ever asked me a question I could answer honestly.

I am eighteen years old now. I have three years, two months, and six days until my Assessment, and I have been in love since March.

Nobody warns you that the countdown starts before you're ready for it. In Calder City, you grow up counting forward — four years until you're old enough for the schoolyard gate, seven years until Junior Rites, eleven years until you can test into the Guild track of your choosing. And then you turn eighteen, and something in the counting flips, and every year after that is years until. Years until your Assessment. Years until the Matchers press their palms to your temples and read whatever it is they read in there — blood, or want, or the shape of a soul — and hand you the name of the person you will marry.

My mother says she cried the day of her Assessment. Not from grief. From relief. She says that's how you know the system works — that the not-knowing is the hardest part, and the moment the Matcher said my father's name, something in her chest that had been clenched since she was eighteen finally let go.

I think about that a lot, these days. The letting go. I wonder what it will do to me, when there's already something inside my chest that refuses to unclench for anyone but one person, and that person is never, under any version of the law, going to be handed to me on a slip of paper by a stranger with cold hands.

His name is Theo Ferrow, and I am not supposed to know the sound he makes when he's trying not to laugh in the reading room, and I do, and it is the single most dangerous piece of knowledge I own.

We meet on the roof of the old grain exchange, which has been empty since before either of us was born, because Theo found the door that doesn't lock three winters ago and never told anyone, and I am the only person he's ever brought up here. You reach it through a stairwell that smells like pigeons and dust, past a window with a crack shaped like a lightning bolt, and then the city just — opens. All the lamplight and the chimney smoke and the dark ribbon of the river cutting through the middle of it, and above that, more stars than the Council allows in the pamphlets they hand out at Junior Rites, the ones with the tidy diagrams of approved adolescent pastimes.

Falling in love is not on that list. It has never once, in the two-hundred-and-eleven-year history of Calder City, been on that list.

"You're late," Theo says, not looking up from whatever he's carving into the ledge with his pocketknife. He does this — talks before I've even finished climbing through the window, like the conversation started somewhere in his head hours ago and I just walked into the middle of it. It is, infuriatingly, one of my favorite things about him.

"My mother wanted to talk about my Assessment."

That gets his attention. He looks up. In the lamplight coming off the street below, his eyes are the particular dark gold they get when he's trying to arrange his face into something careless and not quite managing it.

"That's not for three years."

"Two months and six days less than three years, according to her calendar," I say, and climb the rest of the way through, and sit down beside him on the ledge like it's an ordinary thing to do, dangle your legs off a four-story drop with the boy who isn't allowed to love you back. "She's already picking out fabric for the Assessment dress. She wants to know if I want the sleeves that lace or the sleeves that button."

"Do you?"

"I don't want either. I don't want any of it, Theo, I don't want to stand in the Hall of Names in a dress my mother picked out and let a stranger tell me who I'm supposed to—" I stop myself. We don't finish that sentence. We have an unspoken agreement, made sometime around our second winter of this, that we do not finish that sentence, because finishing it means admitting there's a clock running, and we are both very good at pretending there isn't, up here, above the pigeons and the dust and the whole tidy machinery of the city.

Theo sets his knife down. He doesn't say anything for a moment, and that's how I know he heard the end of the sentence anyway, the part I didn't say.

"There's a story my grandmother used to tell," he says instead, which is not where I expected this to go. "About a boy and a girl who fell in love before their Assessments. Real old story — before my grandmother's grandmother, even. They kept it secret for years. Right up until the Matchers found the letters."

I go still. Everyone in Calder City knows some version of this story. It has a hundred names, a hundred small variations — sometimes it's a boy and a girl, sometimes two girls, sometimes it happens in the Textile Quarter and sometimes on a farm out past the grain fields — but the shape of it never changes, because the shape of it is the entire point. It is not a love story. It is a warning wearing a love story's clothes.

"You don't have to—"

"They were banished," Theo says anyway, quiet, watching the river instead of me. "Both of them. Cast out past the north wall, the way they do it, no name, no guild mark, no house that'll take them in because taking in an outcast makes you an outcast too. And the story goes that they lasted eleven months out there together. That should be the happy part, right? Eleven months, still together, still choosing each other." He picks the knife back up, turns it over once in his hand, doesn't carve anything. "And then one morning a farmer found them at the bottom of the quarry past Miller's Ridge. Both of them. Together. On purpose."

"I know the story."

"Everybody knows the story," he says. "That's the whole design of it, isn't it? It's not really a warning about the quarry. It's a warning about this." He gestures, one hand, taking in the roof, the two of us, the entire quiet architecture of a thing we built out of stolen hours. "They tell it to seven-year-olds at Junior Rites so that by the time you're old enough to actually feel something real, the fear's already sitting in you, underneath the wanting, so deep you can't dig it out without digging out the wanting too."

I don't answer right away, because my throat has done the thing it does sometimes, up here, where it closes around words that are too large to fit through it. Below us, a bell tower somewhere in the Hall District tolls the ninth hour, and I think, unbidden, the way I always do at the ninth hour: one thousand one hundred and eighteen days. I have started doing the arithmetic without meaning to. I don't know when that started.

"Do you believe it?" I ask finally. "The story. That it's true."

Theo looks at me for a long moment — long enough that I feel it in my sternum, that particular gravity he has, like he's the only steady point in a room that's tilting. "I believe somebody died in that quarry," he says. "I don't believe it happened the way they tell it." A pause. "I don't believe anything the Matchers hand down for free."

It's the closest either of us has ever come to saying the dangerous thing out loud — not I love you, we've said that one, whispered it into each other's collarbones a hundred times up here where no Matcher's palm will ever press against either of our temples and read it back to us as evidence. The dangerous thing is the other one. The one that says: what if the whole machine is wrong.

I don't get the chance to answer him, because that's when I hear it — the specific, unmistakable creak of the stairwell door below, the one that doesn't lock, the one only Theo and I are supposed to know about, and it is nine hours past curfew, and there is a beam of lantern light sweeping up through the dark of the stairwell toward us, and a voice — a woman's voice, clipped and formal in the particular cadence they train into every single person who wears the grey sash of the Matcher's Guild — calling up into the stairwell:

"This is Guild business. Whoever is on that roof, you will come down now, and you will come down separately."

Theo's hand finds mine in the dark, one last time, cold-knuckled and certain.

"Separately," he whispers, already letting go, already moving toward the far edge of the roof where the fire ladder hangs rusted and half-forgotten against the brick. "Go to the stairs. I'll take the ladder. Don't let them see us together, Wren. Don't—"

But the lantern light has already found my face.