Beautiful Blue World (11 page)

AT MORNING WORK THE
next day, I decided to stick with Brid and Caelyn. Annevi didn't need or want help finding her ships. And I did
not
want to sit with the bombing-predicting boys and their cold calculations.

But as I walked in, Gunnar caught my eye. He shook his head ever so slightly.

They
hadn't
bombed Lykkelig!

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.

Everyone was safe for another day.

“Thank you,” I mouthed.

He nodded.

But—had
his
home been bombed?

I didn't want to go ask in front of the other boys. They might make fun of him for worrying. It would have to wait.

Because they had predicted Lykkelig, did that mean somewhere else went unprotected? Did Tyssia manipulate our predictions on purpose, create a pattern and then break it?

Of course they did. The boys would have to learn to be three steps ahead of them.

I climbed up onto one of the high chairs at the table Brid and Caelyn had picked. They both had stacks of papers with gibberish printed on them.

Brid split her stack and passed me half of it.

“Look through for things that repeat, and circle them. You can use different colors for each different repeating set.”

I took up the red pencil she slid across to me, and scanned the rows and rows of letters. At first I didn't see anything repeat. I wasn't even sure if it would be repeats of three letters or five or whole strings of them.

After a few minutes I looked up to see the girls circling things with quick drops of their pencils to switch colors; Caelyn held two pencils in her right hand so that she had to switch less often. They flipped through their pages pretty quickly, though sometimes they would turn back to earlier pages to note a couple more things.

“Um…can you read that?” I asked.

“Read it?” Caelyn asked, sounding puzzled. “We don't need to read it.”

“They read it downstairs,” Brid explained. “It's coded. Ciphered, actually. We look for patterns and repeats. Downstairs, they can use those to guess at common possible words, phrases, or place-names, and then line up all the letters and changes to see if they're consistent. It saves them time if we look at the pages first.”

“Oh.” I continued scanning my paper, whispering the letters out loud because I thought it might be easier for me to hear than see a repeat. I heard myself say “TXR” a few times, so I circled it everywhere I saw it. Maybe those letters stood in for a common word in Tyssian.

I found a couple other things. Before I knew it, we were being called for lunch. Brid took my pages back, and looked over them, circling other things here and there. “This isn't too bad.”

Which meant it wasn't too good, either.

Didn't they care that they didn't know what these messages
meant
?

Outside, Annevi turned Tyssia Tag to Tyssia Tackle and managed to bring Tommy—the tallest—down to take in a faceful of moss as she stripped off his armband. My heart was already pounding from running; I didn't want to land face-first in moss.

I noticed Fredericka, the reader, sitting by herself on a low stone wall by the house.

I sat down next to her. “You don't like to play?”

“Not really. But they make everyone go outside.”

“Yeah, they told me.”

“Don't you like it? It looked like you were having fun.”

“I was, but…I'm tired now.” I took off my tiger-striped armband.

She nodded.

“Have you been here a long time?”

“Six months.”

“Who's been here the longest?”

“Tommy. And then Hamlin.”

“You're good at reading?

“Yes,” she said, though not in a conceited way.

Everyone here was good at something.

Everyone except me.

“Why did they pick us? Kids, I mean.”

She shrugged. “If people are good at something, does it matter how old they are?”

I shook my head. “I guess I didn't mean like that. I guess what I meant is that I'm surprised the grown-ups saw it that way.”

“I told you Tommy was the first—his dad's a mathematician at a university. Tommy used to go in as a little boy, solve puzzles and things at his father's desk, just to pass the time. Mr. Olivier, who's here downstairs, had been at the university, too, and he remembered Tommy. He thought a lot of the intelligence would seem like puzzles to Tommy. So they gave him some problems, and he thought of them in a different way than anyone else had. Then they brought him here, and looked for other kids like him.”

“Tommy's father was okay with that?”

“It sounds like he was glad. It's so much safer here.”

“What about your father?”

“A grocer. When there's not a lot of food, it's hard for him to make enough money for us. We always had something to eat, but he worried about how to pay for everything else. When the test came to our town, it seemed like a good idea for me to sit it. It's helped them, the money I've earned.”

“Do you know what's happened to your family?”

She shook her head.

“Is it hard not to write home?”

She nodded. “They were going to—at least, I think they were going to—save up the money so that they could move somewhere safer, up north, farther from the border. If they do, I won't even know where they are.”

Fredericka sounded so sad, I couldn't help putting my hand on hers. Our hands were cold.

I looked away so she could feel like she had some privacy.

The Examiner was staring at me.

Again.

Because I wasn't running and playing?

I couldn't even play right.

The bell rang for the end of playtime. The Examiner rounded everyone up to march back inside and checked all the fresh scrapes and bruises.

As I walked closer, I realized that the Examiner wasn't upset about the scrapes and bruises; she seemed to be admiring them.

Dinner was a potato-and-meat pie with a flaky crust. It was warm, delicious, and filling, though the gravy seemed to stick in my throat.

After dinner, I went to the art room.

I ran my fingers over the crayons, flipped through the stacks of colored paper. If only I could have packed a box to send to Kammi and Tye.

I got a large sheet of paper and a pencil, and sketched without thinking about what I was drawing. After a long while, I got some watercolors, mostly beiges and browns, only hints of color. I worked slowly, letting the layers dry.

The door opened and Miss Ibsen came in.

“It's time to head up to bed.”

“Yes, Miss Ibsen.” I started to clean up the paints and water.

She looked at my painting.

Four people sat around a table: a man, a woman, two children. They didn't have features, really. In front of each person was a heaping plate of food. A disgusting amount of food.

“Is it your family?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“The empty chair…that would have been…your chair?”

I rinsed my brushes out carefully.

Miss Ibsen got some pins and hung up my picture.

She put her arm around me at the door.

“WE'LL LOSE A DAY'S
WORK!”

“The point precisely,” the Examiner said. “You're forgetting to be children. You'll go out for the day and have fun.” She beamed at everyone.

I looked to Gunnar, who shrugged. We would have to wait to know who'd been hit in last night's bombings.

We got our coats and the Examiner counted us off, five kids to one proctor. I was glad to be with Caelyn and Miss Ibsen.

“Stay with your groups,” the Examiner said. “We wouldn't want to lose anyone.”

“Because we know too much,” Caelyn whispered.

She nodded at me as the Examiner continued, “Don't speak to anyone along the way or in the village.”

The Examiner watched us as we left through the south gates. Didn't she want to go on the outing? What would she do instead?

The ground became soft as we plodded toward the village at the bottom of the hill. The stream was quick and swollen from snow melting above us on the mountain.

Annevi ran by, coat flying behind her, giving people a thwack here and there. “Tag!”

“What if she gets lost?” I asked Miss Ibsen.

“Hooting as she does? We couldn't lose Annevi if we tried,” Miss Ibsen said. But she didn't sound mean. She sounded as if Annevi was a delight to her.

I wasn't loud. I could easily be lost.

“You'll be all right, too,” Miss Ibsen said. “Go and be with Caelyn.”

I caught up with Caelyn. We walked silently for a while. Then I asked, “Where do you come from, Caelyn?”

“Up north, by the sea.”

“Do you miss your parents?”

“Yes,” she said, but it didn't sound like an I'm-finished kind of yes. Her breath caught a little, as if she had been about to say more. I waited. “But not because I came here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I missed them before. They died a few years ago. Them and my brothers.”

“Oh no, Caelyn, I'm sorry.”

She shrugged.

“What happened?”

“A flu. I had it, too, but I got better. I lived with my grandparents after that. When they heard about the test, they wanted me to be able to go to university, which they couldn't give me. They wanted me to be with other children, which they couldn't give me. At least, that's what they said.”

Her voice was heavy, as if she didn't believe these things were worth being sent away for. Or as if there may have been other reasons. I thought of my picture from the night before, of the family like mine with all that food and the empty chair.

We walked in silence for a few minutes.

“Caelyn?”

“Yeah?”

“It wasn't because they didn't want you.”

Caelyn linked her arm through mine and we stayed that way for the rest of the walk.

The village had a fountain in the middle, and shops. The fountain was dry, but everyone raced around it, feet slapping the cobblestones, a thunderous version of Kammi running ahead to school. Our journey to the village had taken so long that it was lunchtime. Miss Ibsen bought fifty buns at the baker's and handed them out.

After lunch, we went to the cinema!

I'd never been before.

First they played a newsreel about Sofarender and Eilean forces defending our cities.

“They're a little behind the times,” the boy next to me whispered.

Our forces were still fighting, of course, but the cities and areas they were talking about hadn't been attacked in weeks. Tyssia had moved on to other cities.

One of the proctors shushed the boy.

To any strangers in the theater, it would have sounded like an ordinary “shush,” but it really meant:
Top-secret. Remember, you know nothing.

Then came the feature. A cartoon!

I knew the story. I'm sure everyone did.

A princess lived high on a hill, as we did.

She was locked in, as we were.

Away from her family, as we were.

She was rescued.

Like none of us would be.

After the cinema, we got to explore the shops. We all liked the stationer's best. In addition to pens and paper, it had gifts and toys.

While everyone else looked at the toys, I wandered over to the crisp new envelopes. I picked one up and smelled it, breathing in deeply, closing my eyes.

It smelled like him. Like Father.

My fingers itched over the sample pens. I could get a picture postcard and borrow a pen for just a minute. The stationer would surely have stamps, too.

Where was Miss Ibsen?

There, by the door, discussing the model aerials with Hamlin and a few other boys. The boys were probably complaining about structural inaccuracies in the models. And begging to bring a few back with us.

I had the money Father had given me. Buying a postcard and stamp would be no problem. I looked at the pictures, all of this village or the mountain. I bit my lip.

Not writing home was a stupid rule. And they hadn't reminded us today. How bad would it be if someone could trace my location to this village, half a day's walk from Faetre?

I grabbed a postcard, turned it over, and uncapped a pen.

I paused.

What would I say, anyway?

Happy and safe ~ Mathilde.

I pictured my paintings again.

Maybe just…
Safe…Mathilde.

Why couldn't I think of what to say to them? What would they say to me?

Was this one of those things that Mother had talked about, that the Examiner had talked about? How we protected each other?

That it was easier just to say
That was the right choice
and march forward, without each other?

“Certainly are a lot of you kids here today!”

I jumped.

A man reached over me, paying for a newspaper at the counter. The headline said
BORDER REMAINS STRONG
. Another thing said just for self-preservation?

“Where are all you kids from?”

I knew I wasn't supposed to answer him. But wouldn't it be worse not to?

“A school,” I said.

“Ah. The school up the hill. What do you study?”

“Math…and reading.”

“Very good.”

Miss Ibsen appeared at my side. She nodded to the man, ending the conversation. Then she took the pen from my hand and capped it.