Chapter Three: Always You

Once a month, on the first Sunday, every unmatched citizen of Calder City between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one reports to the Hall of Names for Questioning.

It is not called an interrogation. The pamphlets are very careful about that. It is called a wellness inquiry, and it is conducted in a small grey room with a small grey desk and a Matcher who has asked the same six questions so many thousand times that her voice has worn a groove into them, flat and even, like water running over the same stone for two hundred years.

"Have you experienced any romantic attachment since your last inquiry?"

"No."

"Have you engaged in any unsupervised courtship behavior?"

"No."

"Do you currently hold any romantic feelings toward a specific individual?"

This is the one. This is always the one. I have learned to let my eyes go soft and slightly bored when it comes, to let a full second pass before I answer, because the Matchers are trained to watch for the too-quick denial, the guilty speed of it — my mother taught me that, without knowing she was teaching me anything at all, in an offhand comment years ago about how the Matchers can smell a lie that comes out too fast, the way you can smell rain before it falls.

"No," I say, and count to two in my head before I let myself blink.

The Matcher — a different one every month, rotated on purpose, so you can never learn the specific weather of one particular officer's face — makes a small mark on her ledger and delivers, without any real interest in her own words, the same closing remarks they deliver every month, the ones I could recite in my sleep: the compatibility model has a documented ninety-four percent long-term satisfaction rate; premature attachment statistically correlates with reduced Assessment accuracy; the wisest use of these years is self-cultivation, not distraction. She says distraction the way you'd say a mild illness. Something you catch if you're careless. Something with a cure.

I walk out of the Hall of Names into the pale gold of a Sunday afternoon with my heart going so hard I can feel it in my wrists, the way it always goes on Questioning day, a low continuous hum of I lied, I lied, I lied that takes hours to fade. It has been six months since the rooftop. Six months of Theo at the east docks, sunrise to dark, six days a week. Six months of notes passed through the seam of my satchel, burned in the kitchen stove, ash swept into the yard before my mother wakes.

I have almost stopped hoping for anything more than that.

Almost.

The letter comes two weeks later, tucked between the pages of a book I didn't order, left on the reading room's return shelf where only I would think to check it — a system we built without ever discussing it, the way you build a language with someone over years, one small invention at a time.

Old roof. Seven o'clock. I know it's not safe. Come anyway, if you can. — Always you.

I read the last two words nine times before I understand why my chest does what it does when I read them. We started saying it to each other almost by accident, over a year ago now — Theo, teasing me about the Delacroix boy my mother wouldn't stop mentioning, asking, half-joking, half not, and if the Matchers put his name in your hand at twenty-one, what then? And I'd said, without thinking, without planning it, always you, and watched something in his face crack open like a door letting in light, and after that it just — became ours. A password. A vow with no ceremony behind it, no Guild sanction, no legal weight anywhere in Calder City. Just two words that mean whatever they decide, whoever they choose, the truth of this does not change.

I have never needed to hear it more than I need to hear it now.

I sneak out at ten minutes to seven, out the kitchen window instead of the front door because the front door creaks and my mother has taken to sleeping lightly since the night of the rooftop, though she has never once said why, and I run the whole way to the grain exchange with my shawl pulled up over my hair and my heart in my throat, and when I push through the door that doesn't lock and climb the stairwell that smells like pigeons and dust, past the window with the lightning-bolt crack, he is already there, standing at the ledge with his back to me, and for one full second I just stand in the doorway and look at him, because six months is a very long time to go without looking at someone properly.

He turns like he felt me there before he heard me. Maybe he did.

"Wren."

I don't remember crossing the roof. I remember his arms, how much steadier they feel than I expected, how his hands are rougher now, dock-hands, callused in new places, and how none of that matters even slightly against how it feels to be held by him again. He smells like river water and salt and, underneath that, still, impossibly, like himself — like the boy who used to eat dirt on a dare in the schoolyard, like every version of him I have loved since I was too young to know that's what it was.

When he finally pulls back enough to look at me, I am crying, and I hadn't even noticed I'd started.

"Hey," he says, thumb catching a tear before it reaches my jaw.

"Hey. I'm here. I found a way, didn't I? I promised."

"What if it's not enough?" The words come out of me before I can stop them, before I can dress them up in anything braver. "What if you find a way for three years, Theo, what if we do this perfectly, every letter burned, every note hidden, what if we never once get caught again — and then I turn twenty-one, and I stand in the Hall of Names, and they put someone else's name in my hand?" My voice is cracking apart now, all the careful arithmetic I've been doing for months spilling out of me at once. "What if the ninety-four percent doesn't include us? What if we've been so careful for nothing?"

"Wren—"

"I can't lose you to a ledger," I say, and it comes out half a sob. "I can't have loved you since I was fifteen years old and have it mean nothing because a stranger with cold hands decided I'm better suited to someone I've never even met.

"Then don't let them decide alone."

I stop. He's still holding my face in both hands, and there's something in his expression I've never seen before — not the careless, careful boy from the ledge six months ago, but something sharper, something that's been sitting and sharpening in him through six months of dawn-to-dark labor and letters passed like contraband.

"I've been thinking about it since the roof," he says. "Since the night they almost caught us. About how the only people in this whole city who actually understand how the Assessment works — what the Matchers really read, what actually goes into the decision — are the Matchers themselves. Everyone else just receives it. Like weather. Like something that happens to you." His thumb moves along my cheekbone, slow. "What if you didn't just receive it, Wren. What if you learned how it worked. From the inside."

Understanding arrives in me like cold water. "The apprentice track."

"You'd have to apply this year. Before your nineteenth birthday, they told us in Rites, that's the cutoff." He's talking faster now, like he's been holding this for weeks and it's finally allowed out. "I know it sounds mad. I know it means spending three years training to become exactly the kind of person who's supposed to decide our fate instead of us. But you're the smartest person I've ever known, and if anyone could learn that system well enough to find the seam in it—"

"To find my own name in a file I'd have access to." My mind is already running ahead of him, the way it always does once he's lit the first spark of an idea. "To understand what actually goes into a match, not the pamphlet version. To see if there's a way to—" I can't even finish it. It's too large. It's the most reckless idea either of us has ever had, larger by far than a rooftop, larger than notes burned in a stove, and I feel something rise in my chest that I haven't felt in six months, that I'd almost forgotten the shape of.

Hope.

"I'll do it," I say, and the certainty in my own voice surprises me. "I'll apply for the apprentice track. I'll learn every rule they have, every exception, every crack in two hundred years of ledgers, and I will find a way to make sure that when I stand in that Hall at twenty-one—" I take his face in my hands now, the way he's holding mine, and I say the only vow I have ever meant with my whole body. "It's you. Whatever it takes. Always you."

He kisses me like the word is already a promise kept, and for a while — not long enough, it is never long enough — the ledgers and the Matchers and the two hundred and eleven years of careful, tidy history that stands between us simply cease to exist, and there is only the roof, and the stars the pamphlets don't count, and the particular impossible fact of being held by the one person in Calder City the whole machinery of the city has decided I am not allowed to want.

I don't see the figure in the alley below until I'm halfway down the stairwell, alone, twenty minutes later, my shawl back up over my hair, my heart still not fully returned to its ordinary rhythm.

It's only a shape, really — someone standing very still in the deep shadow between the grain exchange and the cooper's yard next door, unmoving in a way that no one waiting on an ordinary errand ever stands. I freeze in the stairwell doorway, every instinct in me gone sharp and cold at once.

The shape doesn't move toward me. It doesn't move at all. But as I ease past the far side of the building, keeping to the wall, keeping my breath as quiet as I can make it, a sliver of lamplight catches for just one second on something pinned at the shoulder of a long grey coat.

I don't stop to look twice. I don't dare. I run the whole way home with my pulse roaring in my ears, and it isn't until I'm safely back through the kitchen window, until I'm standing in the dark of my own bedroom with my back against the door and my breath finally slowing, that the thought I've been outrunning the entire way catches up to me.

That was not the shape of someone waiting for a cab, or a lover, or a late delivery.

That was the shape of someone standing exactly where they could see the door to the grain exchange. And they had been standing there, I am almost certain, long before I ever came down the stairs.