Reached

you say when people ask where you’ve been.”
    He handed me a sheet of paper. I looked down at the printed words:
    The Officers found me in the forest in Tana, near my work camp. I don’t remember anything about my last evening and night there. All I know is that I ended up in the woods somehow.
    I looked back up. “We have an Officer who is prepared to corroborate your story and claim she found you in the woods,” he said.
    “And the idea is that I’d been given a red tablet,” I said. “To forget that I saw them take the other girls away on the air ships.”
    He nodded. “Apparently one of the girls caused a disturbance. They had to give red tablets to several others who woke up and saw her.”
    Indie,
I thought. She’s the one who ran and screamed. She knew what was happening to us.
    “So we’ll say that
you
went missing after that,” he said. “They lost track of you for a moment, and you wandered off while the red tablet was taking effect. Then they found you days later.”
    “How did I survive?” I asked.
    He tapped the paper in front of me.
    I was lucky. My mother had told me how to identify poisonous plants. So I foraged. In November, there are still plants on the ground that can be used for food.
    In a way, that part of the story was true. My mother’s words did come back to help me survive, but it was in the Carving, not in the forest.
    “Your mother worked in an Arboretum,” he said. “And you’ve been in the woods before.”
    “Yes,” I said. It was the forest on the Hill, not the one in Tana; but hopefully it would be close enough.
    “Then it all adds up,” he said.
    “Unless the Society questions me too closely,” I said.
    “They won’t,” he said. “Here’s a silver box and a tablet container to replace the ones you lost.”
    I took them from him and opened the tablet container. One blue tablet, one green. And one red, to replace the one I’d supposedly taken at an Official’s command in Tana. I thought about those other girls who really did take the tablet; most wouldn’t remember Indie, how she cried out. She’d have disappeared. Like me.
    “Remember,” he said, “you can recall finding yourself alone in the forest and the time you spent foraging for food. But you’ve forgotten everything that
really
happened in the twelve hours before you went on the air ship.”
    “What do you want me to do once I’m in Central?” I asked him. “Why did they tell me I could best serve the Rising from within the Society?”
    I could see him sizing me up, deciding if I really
could
do whatever it is that he wanted. “Central is where the Society planned to send you for your final work position,” he said. I nodded. “You’re a sorter. A good one, according to the Society’s data. Now that they think you’ve been rehabilitated in the work camp, they’ll be glad to have you back, and the Rising can make use of that.” And then he told me what kind of sort to look for, and what I should do when it happened. “You’ll need to be patient,” he said. “It may take some time.”
    Which was a wise piece of advice, it seems, since I haven’t sorted anything out of the ordinary yet. Not that I remember, anyway. But that’s all right. I don’t need the Rising to tell me how to fight the Society.
    Whenever I can, I write letters. I’ve made them in many ways: a
K
out of strands of grass; an
X
with two sticks crossed over each other, their wet bark black against a silvery metal bench in the greenspace near my workplace. I set out a little ring of stones in the shape of an
O
, like an open mouth, on the ground. And of course I write the way Ky taught me, too.
    Wherever I go, I look to see if there are new letters. So far, no one else is writing, or if they are, I haven’t seen it. But it will happen. Maybe even now there’s someone charring sticks the way Ky told me he did, preparing to write the name of someone they love.
    I
know
that I’m not the only one doing these things, committing small acts of rebellion. There are people swimming against the current and shadows moving slowly in the deep. I have been the one looking up when something dark passed before the sun. And I have been the shadow itself, slipping along the place where earth and water meet the sky.
    Day after day, I push the rock that the Society has given me up the hill, over and over again. Inside me are the real things that give me strength—my thoughts, the small stones of my own choosing. They