Last time on Matched.com, Cassia obsesses over Ky for no reason.

But that was then. Now, it’s hiking time!

A girl asks if she’s ever gone hiking before, and another boy says no one’s been hiking.

“My grandfather knew how,” I say.
Lon won’t shut up. “Knew? As in past tense? Is he dead?”

See this is the sort of thing you get in modern America, where you have a lot of different styles of speech as well as differences in how you relate to things. It is not what you should get in anti-imagination conformityville. If you only talk about people in the past tense if they’re dead, then you don’t need to ask.

The person in charge of hiking is some army guy in Army green. Inexplicably, she doesn’t make a big deal about getting to see colored clothes. Also, considering how their army doesn’t seem like it’s much of the army, why wouldn’t they have redone the outfits to fit their whole colorless thing? Plus, green only works as camouflage in greenish environments. They don’t seem to have much in the way of green left.

The guy also has “olive” skin and that’s apparently noteworthy, so I guess they haven’t bred people down to one color yet. Anyway, his age and skin color remind her of her grandfather (…green eyes and coppery hair don’t usually come from olive skin, book) but he’s curt and she realizes he really isn’t anything like her grandfather.

I have to stop looking for Grandfather. He won’t materialize from the trees, no matter how much I wish it could happen.

So it seems she’s more affected by it than she first seemed.

The guy tells them he’s to be called Sir, and really, they’ve redone their whole society but the military still works the same? He then says no one can talk without permission, then orders them to start walking.

He points behind him to one of the thickly forested Arboretum hills. Not the Hill, not the big one, but one of the smaller foothills that are usually off-limits unless you’re an Arboretum employee. These small hills are not that high, but my mother tells me that they are still a good climb through underbrush and growth.

I really wish we were getting more concrete detail here. How big are these hills beyond that they’re smaller than the biggest one? What does thickly forested mean to her? These are all relative terms.

Is he serious? No tips? No training before we start?

While I agree that it’s ridiculous to think of people needing careful directions and training in order to walk up a hill, these people don’t. They clearly don’t handle new things well at all. The concept of walking up a hill was considered so challenging no one’s been allowed to do it for decades.

So they set off and she says the trees remind her of her grandfather, then that maybe she can look at the paper here – apparently she hasn’t dared touch it yet.

semicultivated forest

It’s interesting that she makes that distinction about it being semicultivated instead of thinking it’s wild. But it’s still a relative term – she should have no idea what actual uncultivated forests look like unless she’s been taught about them. Was she? What exactly does this place look like?

We get what I think is our first mention of animals, because apparently there’s birdsong. Yet we haven’t seen any sign of animals living anywhere else despite the fact most birds fly around.

The little hill is still part of the Arboretum proper, so it isn’t truly wild. My shoes become dirty, the soles covered in pine needles and leaves. I stop for a moment and look for a place to scrape off some of the mud so I can move faster. But, here in the Arboretum, the fallen trees and branches are all removed immediately after they fall.

I’m really getting the sense I’m supposed to take this at face value. Why does she expect there to be fallen trees in the first place? Why does she keep comparing it to a wild forest when she should have never seen one?

And it’s particularly weird because this whole bit about the mud on her feet slowing her down is the sort of silly thing someone might think if they hadn’t done much walking, so they didn’t understand how minor the extra weight is or that mud won’t keep accumulating forever but will fall off on its own.

I move even faster, pushing the branches out of my way and ignoring the scratches on my hands. Even when a pine branch snaps back and I feel the sharp slap of needles and sinewy branch on my face, I don’t stop.

Cassia, you live in a world where a ten year old kid having a scratch on his face is big news, where you want detailed directions explaining how to walk uphill. You are not going to be able to shove your way along ignoring scratches. Even people who are good at that will usually flinch from a surprise pine branch in the face.

She makes it to the top, which is an empty spot for some reason. She’s first there.

I veer suddenly and duck into the bushes. I fight my way through until I crouch alone in the middle of a thick patch of tangled leaves where I hope I will be well concealed. Dark brown plainclothes make good camouflage.

She really shouldn’t know anything about concealment, particularly not camouflage.

Anyway, she’s doing this so she can read the paper.

I don’t know where else to read it. If I read it at home someone might find me.

Uh. I thought the “port” computer thing was constantly watching you? Isn’t that a bigger deal? I’d assume your parents share similar sentiments as your grandfather. At most, they might destroy it, but I really doubt they’d turn you in.

My arm brushes against a leaf and a drop of dew falls onto the paper with a sound like ripe fruit dropping to the ground.

How would she know what that sounds like? Their food all comes in processed trays. She probably shouldn’t even know what a ripe fruit looks like.

Anyway, the paper contains poetry her great-grandmother smuggled out.

And it’s apparently a very appropriate poem.

I know why it spoke to Grandfather: Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. And as I read on, I know why it speaks to me: Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.

Weirdly, she keeps thinking about this in poetry terms and not in the sense of her grandfather actually dying.

My words have forked no lightning.
…
Nothing I have written or done has made any difference in this world, and suddenly I know what it means to rage

Now, there’s definitely things to rage against, like the actual dying thing.

But the reason to rage against things is to change them, to fix them. That’s the purpose of it, it’s why it’s a good thing. Raging isn’t the point in itself. If everyone rails against the same things, generation after generation, then no, they’ve made no difference. Sound and fury signifying nothing.

And what’s a difference in the world? I think we really do undervalue happiness. Has Cassia made a difference in anyone’s life? Certainly. She’s a nice, considerate person. Just a little while ago she was talking about sharing her life with her grandfather. Does the fact she made him happy no longer matter once he’s dead? And while it’s hard to say what her sorting job actually involves, it appears to be at least somewhat important, and lead to more important jobs. Doing a good job with matching, for example, will make a difference for everyone involved. It’s not as dramatic as raging against the dying of the light, but it’s still important.

The second poem is Crossing the Bar, and this one she just reads without any comment. Instead she boggles over how long ago it was written, even though almost all the stuff preserved seems to have been written a long time ago.

She hears someone coming up the path and realizes she needs to get back to hiking.

Greedy, I read the second poem, too. I read the words of both poems over again several times, until I hear the sharp snap of a stick near me. Quickly, I fold up the paper and put it away. I have lingered too long. I have to go; to make up the time I’ve lost.

It isn’t until I’m almost at the top of the hill that realization hits me: There’s a reason they didn’t keep this poem.
This poem tells you to fight.

That seems too easy a realization.

The hundred poems were supposed to be the objectively best poems, and also, she’s shown no sign of realizing her society doesn’t want people to fight – she thinks they’re good, remember, so there isn’t anything anyone would want to fight against. This is a line someone might say in an oppressive dystopia where people hate things but don’t realize you can change things, but she’s not supposed to think of it like that.

She should be thinking there’s nothing to rage against, that the poem is exciting but dangerous because it makes her want things that their society doesn’t allow for, that the poem has no meaning to them now because the society is so perfect. And she should really, really be thinking about how they’re not allowed to fight against death, with that being the focal point of her dissatisfaction at the moment.

So, she returns to the top. Only one other person’s there, and it’s Ky. Convenient! Also wow everyone else is really slow.

Ky’s more relaxed than I have ever seen him, leaning back on his elbows with his face tipped toward the sun and his eyes closed. He looks different and unguarded. Looking at him, I realize that his eyes are where I notice most the distance he keeps. Because when he hears me, he opens them and looks at me, and it almost happens. I almost catch a glimpse of something real before I see again what he wants me to see.

Okay I’m really getting tired of Cassia knowing that he has some tortured inner core he hides from everyone. This kind of thing should be completely outside her experience, and I like that. I’m sick of boys with tortured inner cores that need girls to understand them.

Then the army guy appears to say that their predictions said she’d finish second, so I guess they’re really pleased with their statistics. It’s weird – why not have him making a notch because they thought she’d be first? She was first, then doubled back into the woods, then sat around reading, then ran back up. Why would the prediction exactly match what happened when she did a bunch of stuff they weren’t predicting?

“Sit there and wait,” the Officer says, pointing toward the grassy clearing at the top of the hill. “Enjoy the view. According to this, it’s going to be a few minutes before anyone else gets up here.” He gestures to the datapod

And we’ve just seen how very inaccurate that is, so someone should be showing up any second now.

So she awkwardly goes over to talk to Ky.

I’ve never seen him finish first in anything before, and I speak before I think. “You beat us all today,” I say, as if that fact weren’t obvious.

“Yes,” he says, looking at me. “Exactly as predicted. I grew up in the Outer Provinces and have had the most experience with activities like this.” He speaks formally, as if reciting data, but I notice a sheen of sweat across his face; and the way he’s stretching his legs out in front of him looks familiar. Ky’s been running, too, and he must be fast. Do they have trackers in the Outer Provinces? If not, what did he run to out there? Were there also things he had to run from?

WHY ARE YOU THINKING THIS STUFF IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE

There’s more about how emo and vulnerable he is, and he says she shouldn’t ask that, then he asks her who she lost, so I guess his mom is dead, and she says her grandfather, so he asks if it was an expected death.

“It was his eightieth birthday.”
“That’s right,” Ky says thoughtfully, almost to himself. “People here die on their eightieth birthday.”

Okay, so apparently it was different in the outer provinces. But he’s been there since ten and not only that but Cassia will not shut up about how perfect he is at blending in. He shouldn’t be fumbling over basic stuff like this.

She’s more understandably confused, and he says that living to eighty is a bit dicer where he came from.

Are there different death ages in different places?

Oh come on, Cassia. He didn’t say they don’t live that long, he said it’s rarer, and also he was wondering if your grandfather’s death was unexpected. In other words, where he used to live people don’t always make it to eighty for their state-mandated killing and usually kick the bucket earlier. You’re super in tune to everything else about him and can’t even work this out?

Cassia then thinks about how she doesn’t dare ever read the paper again, and then realizes someone must have seen her reading it because apparently it’s impossible for a stick to snap nearby unless it’s a person reading over your shoulder. Confirming this nonsense, Ky abruptly says he saw her.

For the first time I can remember, he touches me. His hand on my arm, fast and hot and gone before I know it. “You have to be careful. Something like that—”
“I know.” I want to touch him back, to put my hand on his arm too, but I don’t. “I’m going to destroy it.”

Oh my god why.

No one else knows it exists. It’s lasted about seventy years in there with no problem. If anything, trying to get rid of it is more dangerous.

Ky references this by asking if she thinks she can safely destroy it without anyone catching her, but does not just tell her it’s a stupid idea. Instead he offers to help.

He glances over at the Officer as he says this, casually, and I realize something that I haven’t noticed until now because he’s so good at hiding it. Ky always acts as though someone watches him

Wouldn’t everyone think they were being watched? Because they are? If he’s acting weird, it should be because he’s acting secretive, not paranoid.

She asks how he managed to get here first, and it’s because he ran. Apparently he’s faster. Then she says he doesn’t need to help she, she can do it on her own.

Then, because I don’t want him to think I’m an idiot, a risk-taker for the sake of risk-taking, I say more than I should. “My grandfather gave it to me. I shouldn’t have kept it as long as I did. But . . . the words are so beautiful.”

So she feels happy around Xander and like an idiot around Ky. While Cassia isn’t our typically awful YA protagonist, it’s looking like this will end up the typically awful YA romance.

She says she kept it because she won’t be able to remember the words soon, and he asks if she wants to, which she thinks is him calling her a dumbass. Way to prove why you shouldn’t be allowed to pick your love interest, Cassia.

They split up to go hang out with their arriving friends and stare at various things in the distance. But she’s still thinking about Ky.

What happened to you in the Outer Provinces? What Infraction did your father commit that made you an Aberration? Do you think I’m crazy for wanting to keep the poems? What is it about your voice that makes me want to hear you speak?
Are you supposed to be my Match?

So in sum, seeing Ky’s face on the card has caused Cassia to obsess about some kid she never thought about before, and it’s mostly because she thinks they’re “supposed” to be matched for some inexplicable reason. I’m really not seeing any sign here that the matching system doesn’t work.