Lahat ng Kabanata ng Before They Choose : Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

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 somethi

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 spe

The apprentice application sits on the kitchen table for three days before I touch it.It's not a long document ,a single folded sheet of the Guild's heavy cream paper, stamped at the corner with the same crest that watches over every doorway in the Hall of Names: two open hands, palm up, cradling a small carved star. We do not choose for you. We only help you see clearly. That's the motto, printed in careful script beneath the crest, and I have read it perhaps a thousand times in my life without ever once considering how much weight those words are carrying, how much they are doing the work of making a decision feel like a gift.I fill it in on the fourth night, alone, by candlelight, after my parents have gone to bed. Name. Age. Guild aptitude scores from Junior Rites, which I remember with an unpleasant jolt were recorded by the very Institution I'm now asking to let me inside. A short essay — no more than three hundred words on why you believe you would serve Calder City well as a

I have walked past the Hall of Names my entire life without ever once being permitted past its outer courtyard, and nothing in eighteen years of glancing up at its spires from the street prepares me for what it feels like to walk through its gates as someone who now belongs to it. The building is older than anything else in Calder City except the cathedral, built in the same grey stone, though where the cathedral reaches upward in spires meant to draw the eye toward something distant and holy, the Hall of Names spreads outward instead — low, wide, deliberate, a building built to hold and to keep rather than to inspire. Its central dome is said to be lined entirely in ledgers, floor to ceiling, two hundred and eleven years of them, though I won't see that room myself for weeks yet. What I see, on my first morning, is a courtyard full of other apprentices — perhaps thirty of us in total, all somewhere between eighteen and twenty, all dressed in the same plain grey the Institution issu

The lesson on Guild history and folklore falls on an ordinary Tuesday, tucked between a morning on legal charter and an afternoon of supervised reading practice, and I almost don't clock its significance until Instructor Perrin writes a single word on the slate at the front of the hall: Miller's Ridge. The room goes very still. I feel my own pulse pick up before I've even fully understood why, some older, animal part of me recognizing the shape of the story before my conscious mind catches up to it. "Every citizen of Calder City knows some version of this story," Instructor Perrin says, in the same flat voice she uses for legal charter and bookkeeping alike, as though the two hundred and eleven years of grief behind this particular lesson carry no more weight than a footnote. "I want to teach you the formal Guild account, because as Matchers, you will be asked, more often than you expect, to explain to frightened young cit