Crossed (Matched, #2)

by Ally Condie

I’m standing in a river. It’s blue. Dark blue. Reflecting the color of the evening sky. I don’t move. The river does. It pushes against me and hisses

“Get out of there,” the Officer says. He shines his flashlight on us from his position on the bank. “You said to put the body in the water,”

“I didn’t say you had to get in yourself,” the Officer says. “Let go and get out. And bring his c...

The Officers and Officials want us to be scared of this river—of all rivers—so that we never try to drink from them and never try to cross over.

The icy water reaches my knees, and the dead boy’s head lolls back, his open eyes staring at the sky. The dead don’t see but I do. I see too many things. I always have.

But Vick steps in, too. Now the dead boy’s legs are wet and his black plainclothes sodden.

“Was that dinner last night something he chose? If it was, he deserves to be dead.”

This boy died because the Officers judged wrong. They didn’t give him enough water and now he’s dead too soon.

have to hide the body because we’re not supposed to die in this holding camp.

The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I’m not. I’m only afraid of dying wrong.

Aberrations end,” the Officer tells us impatiently. He takes a step in our direction. “You know that. There’s no last meal. There’s no last words. Let go and get out.”

Citizens end with banquets. Last words. Stored tissue samples to give them a chance at immortality.

corner washbasin runs over my hands, turning them red, making me think of Ky. My hands look a little like his now.

Ky is gone. All of this—faraway province, work camp, dirty hands, tired body, aching mind—is because Ky is gone and because I want to find him. And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.

After this, I’ve been informed, I will go on to Central, the biggest City of the Society, for my final work position in one of the sorting centers there. A real work position,

My three months’ work detail has taken me to several camps, but so far all of them have been in Tana Province. I had hoped to find my way to the Outer Provinces somehow,

It’s the seventh day, the day the messages come.

We each have one of these little bags and we are supposed to carry them with us at all times. The bag is full of messages; like most of the other girls, I keep the papers until they can’t be read anymore.

I look at the old messages while I wait. The other girls do the same.

My last message from Bram tells me that he works hard in the fields and is an exemplary student at school, never late to class, and it makes me laugh because I know he’s stretching the truth on that last count at least.

he says he viewed Grandfather’s microcard, the one from the gold box at the Final Banquet.

His favorite of me was when I said my first word and it was “more.” His favorite of you was what he called “the red garden day.”

Even more than that, I wish I remembered the red garden day. I remember many days sitting on a bench and talking with Grandfather

message from my parents seems full of elation; they had received the word that this next work camp rotation would be my last.

They believed enough in love to give me a chance to find Ky, but they are not sorry to see that chance end.

know I look different. It’s not just my hands. In spite of the full meal portions, I’ve grown thinner from all the work. My eyes have shadows

The only time we can see people is when the Society allows it. In life, on the port, on a microcard.

If people were dead or had gone away, at least you remembered how they looked. But that hasn’t been allowed in years.

Matching procedures are being streamlined for maximum efficiency and to increase optimal results. I wonder if there have been other errors.

can’t get in trouble for keeping this—after all, it’s not something illegal or contraband. It was printed from a regulation port.

never thought to bring any of the Hundred Paintings,” Lin says, looking down. “I didn’t think of it either,” I say. “Someone gave this to me.”

don’t know why I didn’t carry around pictures and poems all the time before I came here.

In one swift motion, Indie brushes the pieces from my bed. She didn’t even look to do it. That’s how I know she cared about losing the picture, because she knew exactly where the fragments lay. I carry them to be incinerated, my eyes blurring with tears.

bring out the compass and the blue tablets, plant them deep, and come for them later. Besides being illegal, they are both valuable gifts: the compass, golden and bright, can tell me which direction I need to go.

Xander stole several dozen for me; I could live for a long time. Together, their gifts are the perfect combination for survival.

In these camps, I try to conceal the fact that I’m a Citizen from the other workers.

overheard conversations between some of the girls about having to give up their tablet containers. Which means that somehow—through their own mistakes or those of their parents—some of these girls have lost their Citizenship. They’re Aberrations, like Ky. There’s only one classification lower than Aberration: Anomaly.

seems to me now that, once the Anomalies were gone, the Aberrations took their place—at least in the c...

I used to worry that I could cause the Reclassification of my family. But now I’ve figured out the rules from Ky’...

If a parent becomes Reclassified, the whole family does, too. But if a child becomes Reclassified, the family does not. The child alone bears the weight of the Infracti...

how he could only come back from the Outer Provinces because someone else was killed, and how his aunt and uncle, Patrick and Aida Markham, might have been even higher up in the Society than any of us realized.

leaving to find Ky will not destroy my family. I can cause my own Reclassification, but not theirs.

one message for me, a combined one from my parents and Bram. Nothing from Xander. He has never missed a week before.

“Cassia,” the Officer says. “Please come with me to the main hall. We have a communication for you.”

“Cassia,” someone else says, a voice I know. And then I look up, and I don’t believe what I see. He’s here. The port is blank, and he stands before me, real. He’s here.

Here. I put my red, mapped hands over my eyes because it’s too much to see. “Xander,”

been a month and a half since we left that boy in the water.

No one lasts six months. When I climb out, there will be black buildings and splintered gray sagebrush. Burned, fallen bodies strewn along the orange sandy earth.

“What are you doing?” someone asked. I didn’t recognize the voice, but that didn’t mean much.

We die faster and faster these days.