Last time on Matched.com, Cassia’s issues with officials worsen and Ky continues to be a terrible influence on her.
When they go back to their houses they see officials. They’re parked at Em’s house today.
I hold back from hissing, “Why do you watch us? What do you know?”
I guess you can make sense of Cassia’s behavior if you assume she’s been incredibly resentful of the officials and society at large for a long time now but tried to pretend she wasn’t, and it’s all coming out now.
The officials leave Em’s house only to go to the next house. Cassia and Xander head over to see if she’s okay and she’s sobbing and apologizing to Cassia.
“They said that I’d been seen with an artifact at the Match Banquet, and they’d come to collect it. I told them it wasn’t mine, I’d borrowed it from you and given it back.” She swallows and I remember the night of the green tablet. I put my arm around her and glance at Xander. Em keeps speaking, her voice shaky. “I shouldn’t have told them. But I was so scared! Now they’re going to take it from you. They’re going house to house.”
What the hell? They’re just being dicks for the sake of it now.
Also, Cassia remembers she still has Ky’s artifact, which is going to be a lot more of a problem if it’s found. She rushes off to her house.
Ky is already an Aberration. If they find out that he has an artifact, will he become an Anomaly?
So…things that make you an anomaly:
1) Murdering a little boy.
2) Having an unregistered artifact.
It’s like they made up the rules using a dartboard.
Xander, not realizing it’s the compass she’s freaking out about, offers to hide her compact.
Say you’ve lost it. Make your story convincing.”
The way everyone acts makes it clear these are people well-versed in lying and covering for each other. All you need are some informants and this place is basically a warmer version of Soviet Russia.
He even already knows how to do it – she can hug him, then drop it into his shirt. Xander thinks fast.
She heads into her house. She really wishes she could save the compact, but…
saving Ky’s artifact saves both of us from questioning and him from becoming an Anomaly.
…so that’s not just random speculation, she’s apparently pretty sure it’s what will happen.
“Thank you,” I say, and then I kiss him right on the lips and I mean that kiss. Even though I know I’m falling for Ky it is impossible not to love Xander for everything he is and everything he does.
Why Teenagers Shouldn’t Make Decisions About Anything, Ever.
She goes back inside and her brother tells her it’s worse than she thought: “They’re taking the artifacts,” Bram says, voice shaking. “They called Papa in to help with the collection.”
And…that has what to do with her loaning an artifact to someone else?
She tells Bram to get his watch.
“Bram. Something bad could have happened to the watch even without this. You could have lost it. You could have broken it. But this way you can look at it one last time. It’s never really lost to you as long as you remember it.”
This is interesting because it’s the same reasoning they use to kill the elderly.
He begs her to help him hide it and she says no, so they just sit and wait until the officials get there.
“The Government has decided that artifacts promote inequality among members of Society,” he says. “We request that everyone turn in their artifacts for catalog and display at the Museum in each City.”
So her loaning it out to someone else made them decide it’s inequal?
Or did this all just happen and Em just thinks it’s her fault? But they did land outside her house and question her about one she had at the banquet, and we know artifacts have to be registered.
“Our records indicate that there are two legal artifacts in this residence,” a tall Official adds.
That seems redundant. If it’s in their records, it’s only the registered legal ones, and furthermore, they should assume the artifacts are all registered because it seems like illegal anything is insanely rare.
They say they have to search the house so she and Bram can sit with their artifacts a bit longer.
“Nothing valuable here,” one of them says quietly to another in the hallway.
That’s a very, very weird word choice. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why artifacts would necessarily be valuable, and by their standards artifacts should be completely valueless, since you apparently only get them by inheritance. I don’t think they even have money, come to think of it. This kind of talk makes it seem like this is just an attempt to grab artifacts for the people in charge, but it’s going to be put in the museum, so if anything didn’t show up people would know.
The value bit triggers an internal rant by Cassia about how they don’t know real value like the poems she read.
Like with the food, Cassia notes that the officials aren’t spared this. She can see on the official’s hand that the woman used to wear a ring.
The Official takes my compact; she takes the watch from Bram. “You can come see them in the Museum. Any time you like.”
What’s weird is it seems like they actually have a perfectly good reason for taking them. Cassia told Bram he could have lost or broken the watch, and Xander thought that they could lie about her losing the compact, so it seems there’s a reasonably steady loss of artifacts over time that might motivate the government to decide it’s better to collect what’s left and store it somewhere safer, particularly when the description we got in the opening chapters implies they flat-out can’t manufacture stuff like this any longer.
Upset, Cassia tears at the brown envelope Ky used to give her the compact, and she discovers there’s a more of his picture/poetry mix on the inside.
Drowning, drinking the words at the top say
…
Two Kys again, the younger one, and the one now, both of them with hands still cupped. The background in the first one is a spare, bare landscape, the bones of rocks rising behind Ky. In the second picture, he’s here in the Borough. I see a maple tree behind him. Rain falls in both pictures, but in the first one his mouth is open, his head tipped back, he drinks from the sky. In the second one his head is down, his eyes panicked, the rain thick around him, streaming off him like a waterfall. There is too much rain here.
I must say the author does a good job of what deep and profound look like when you’re a teenager. I kind of thought people were outgrowing that by seventeen, but I guess in a world where you can’t have a goth phase at fourteen it takes a while to get it out of your system.