Last time on Matched.com, Cassia finally tells Xander she’s in love with someone else. Xander is less than happy.

She thinks about taking the green tablet. Instead she cracks the glass frame holding the bit of her dress and takes the silk square out to put in her pocket.

Then right back to hiking, yet again.

The Officer is not at hiking today.

I’ve given up trying to make sense of these sorts of detail. I keep waiting for it to add up and yet it never does. It could mean he’s been called away to fight whatever the war is. Could mean he’s being punished for not keeping a better eye on Cassia. Could just mean that they’ve decided the hiking experiment a loss.

I wonder if the author has the idea that since sometimes things just happen without them meaning anything, it’s good to have details like this just pop up without going anywhere. You can write like that, but not when there aren’t other details that do go places. There are so many things that matter the author never bothered with.

So yeah, it’s an official instead and he tells them hiking’s done with because leisure summer activities have been canceled.

Take down as many of the red flags as you can and knock over the cairns.”

…Weren’t those to mark obstacles? So, shouldn’t they be removed when whatever the obstacle was?

“Why?” Lon asks in a whine. “We spent half the summer marking these paths!”

That’s not the same thing as marking things to be cleared. And is that the idea? Were they all set at certain points to each make a separate path? Why bother removing stuff regardless?

This should not be so hard to figure out. It’s trivial.

Cassia realizes Ky likes Lon for asking annoying questions because no one else asks them. I’d think he’d think Lon was stupid for not realizing the obvious.

She starts to untie things, and Ky tells her to just see if they can get to the top.

As we break into the last part of the forest, the part we haven’t charted, I stop. “Wait,” I say. If we’re really going to clear this Hill, I want to pull out the last tangles and twists so we can stand on the top free and open.

By which she means finally telling the truth. Surely you could have decided to do that on the top instead of right before?

Anyway, she explains that she was upset before because she thought it meant that the officials were behind their being in love, because his face had shown up on her card.

“You don’t throw something away just because they predicted it,” he protests.

Exactly. God, Cassia.

She complains she doesn’t want them to be making her choices, and he says they aren’t.

“Sisyphus and the rock,” I say, remembering. Grandfather would have understood that story. He rolled the rock, he lived the life the Society planned for him, but his thoughts were always his own.
Ky smiles. “Exactly.

…what?

What?

So then Ky tries again to get her to go up, and she tries again to not go up by confessing the next thing, but he already knows about the sorting and why she did it – they must have told her about the impossible poisoning.

Most of us figure it out. But none of us are in a position to complain. Our lives are still much longer here than they’d be in the Outer Provinces.”

So like Ky, apparently all the menial workers have super analysis skills. Also, if their drastically shortened lives are “much longer” than in the outer provinces, the outer provinces must be a population sinkhole – particularly given it doesn’t look like they have a high reproductive rate, Ky’s family seems to have only had him. And it’s not like they need population sinkholes when even the subset of people matched in the regular provinces seem to only have one or two kids. Their population should be in freefall by now.

There’s no way the provinces could be worth anything with people dying at what, forty? Thirty? There’s no reason to maintain buffer colonies, hasn’t been for at least a century now, just stick your wall of missiles there.

Anyway, they finally climb up. Cassia says it’s very different being up top even though it’s not like the world has changed. Ky gives her his compass. She says she doesn’t know how to use it.

“I think Xander can teach you,” he says

Is this all just a really elaborate setup for a joke about women being terrible with directions? Because I can’t see why else Xander would know how to read a compass if she didn’t.

Ky claims the compass will help find him, so, maybe he’ll be sent away and she’ll have to try to chase him down by using the compass to point in the direction of whatever province he ends up in. Only there’s been no sign they don’t have perfectly good maps in this country, and also that sounds entirely too unpassive and interesting for a girl protagonist. And this book is almost over, so it’ll have to be in the sequel. Pretty sure whatever the ending to this book, it’s going to be unsatisfying.

Then he gives her another paper with what’s apparently the last of the story and says to read it later. She gives him the green silk.

Then they kiss. I’d have cared half a book ago, book, but come on, you’re about to end. Get on with things.