A spark of humor gleamed in Iris’s eyes, despite everything. “Okay, we can each blame each other’s parents for screwing up our childhoods.”
“That’s fair. Deal.”
She squeezed his hand.
“Anyway, I kept growing up, and I kept not changing—or at least not getting any better-behaved. I already knew I couldn’t make my parents happy, and it was easier not to try than to try and fail. I leaned into being the bad, rebellious daughter. But I don’t want it to sound like it was an act. It wasn’t. The times when I tried to play along with all the rules to make my family happy—thatwas the act. The truth was that I didn’t like how they wanted me to be. I didn’t always want to be all decorous and dignified. I wanted to take risks. Toexperiencethings.”
She looked at him like she was pleading with him to understand, and he did. He’d been too obsessively rule-following to let himself think like that as a kid, but he had felt like that since then.
The world was full of wonderful, silly, messy things that the Silver Council frowned on. Pop music. Chocolate-covered donuts. Laughing at yourself.
“You deserve experiences,” Keith said. “Adventures, even. I’m sorry this place made it so hard for you to get them.”
She exhaled. “I kept thinking about leaving for good. I mean, if I thought about it once, I thought about it a thousand times, but ... you know what that would mean.”
Yeah. It wasn’t pretty. If you weren’t a tribute, or matched to a tribute, then your trips outside the bounds of the village were supposed to be temporary and purposeful, with an emphasis ontemporary. If you decided you were actually going to move somewhere else ... well, Keith only remembered one person from Purity who had done that.
The Silver Council viewed it as a rejection—no, abetrayal—of all their culture’s norms and traditions. It rescinded the traitor’s citizenship and banned them from any and all unicorn settlements under its rule. Officially, there was no ban on staying in touch with someone who had left, but that was just a technicality. Everyone knew what the Council would think of someone who chose family or friendship over honor.
“I remember what happened with Horace Bulger,” Keith said. “He used to tutor me in history, and then ....”
Horace had been an old, harmless eccentric, whose desire to travel the world in his last few years had eventually outweighed his ties to home. It would’ve been impossible to dislike him: he was just a pleasant, dotty guy with a huge collection of maps of all the places he’d never been. And then, overnight, his name had become virtually unmentionable. His grandchildren disavowed him. Horace had even written to them, but they’d pointedly refused to ever pick up those letters.
Teenaged Keith had missed Horace, with his flyaway hair and his excitement about the world, but he’d thought Horace’s family was making the hard but moral choice.
Now he just wished he knew what had happened to old Horace. Keith hoped he’d gotten to Egypt. That used to be his favorite place to talk about.
Iris was nodding. “I used to go over to his house so he could show me all his maps. He had this one gorgeous atlas with all these color photos—I’d look at it for hours. He was just the sweetest old man. And then everyone acted like he’d slaughtered ten people in the town square.”
“It must’ve been hard to imagine leaving after that.”
Iris nodded, tears shimmering in her eyes. “I had so many nightmares that everyone had somehow learned I’dthoughtabout leaving, and they were already turning on me. It was awful. I didn’t want to lose my family. And I just kept thinking ... where would I even go? What would I even do?”
Keith had never gotten stuck with that particular problem, since the Council had always planned to funnel him into the outside world. He had a college degree, even if he’d barely spoken to another student the entire time. He had a driver’s license. He’d had people to point him in the right direction.
It had never struck him how awful it would be to have gone out into the worldwithoutthat kind of backing.
Sure, Horace had done it, but only once he’d already built up a lifetime’s worth of savings. And he wouldn’t have cared about fitting in. If the outside world had found him sheltered, out-of-touch, and odd, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference to him.
To a younger Iris, just starting out on her own and fantasizing about escape? It would have madeallthe difference. And she would have been acutely aware of the huge gaps in her knowledge of how basic things worked outside of the village.
Educational standards were high here, in a lot of ways, even if they didn’t come with official certifications. But there was a lot they didn’t cover. Iris was probably an expert on history and science and classic literature ... but not on the ins-and-outs of life in the real world.
He felt a sudden surge of revulsion at how few options she’d had.
“Do you think they do it on purpose?” he said.
“Do what?”
“Make it so hard to leave.”
“I’ve wondered that before,” Iris admitted. “The rules are so old that it’s hard to know what whoever first made them was thinking. Maybe it’s just that they don’t go out of their way to prepare us for a world they don’t like, any more than one country would spend a lot of time teaching you about how to live in another one ... but it’s not a country. It’s a village. Even if you take every Council village and throw them all together, there still aren’t enough of us to fill a big city.”
She was right. Whether or not the Council had planned it deliberately, the effect was the same. They knew how narrow their world was, and they still made it hard for people to even get a peek out the window.
Purity was home. But it was also more deeply, profoundly messed-up than he’d realized, even after years of coming to terms with the Council’s failings.
I think we might be in a cult.
