Perfect Ruin (10 page)

Ms. Harlan looks as though she would like to ask another question as I grab my satchel from the floor. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I have to go. I’ll have only two minutes to get to class. Thank you for the tea.”

“Tomorrow then,” she says.

“Tomorrow.”

Pen finds me in the hallway. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she says, hanging on my shoulder as we walk. “It’s my fault you’re being punished. Can you ever forgive me?”

“I suppose you can carry my bag,” I say.

She eagerly takes it.

“I was kidding,” I say.

“So what happened?” she asks. “Did you have to write passages from
The History of Internment
a thousand times in slantscript?”

People haven’t written in slantscript on a daily basis for more than a hundred years, but it’s still taught in the middle-grade years as a form of history. The letters all curl into and around one another like ribbons; I couldn’t read it, much less write it. Most students would call it torture, but Pen has a real talent for it.

I shake my head. “What did you tell Basil?”

“You were being tutored in math. It was the most convincing excuse I could come up with. You are atrocious with graphs.”

I don’t like the idea of lying to my betrothed. I can’t imagine Lex and Alice ever lying to each other, and one day I want my marriage to be like theirs. Or, the way it used to be, at least.

But I can’t tell Basil the whole truth—about my fascination with Judas and my wonderings about the edge, because in his protectiveness he may have me declared irrational. But lying is no way to handle things, either. That’s what the edge does—it lures you away from those you care about. It ends your life even before your shoe has crumbled dirt into the atmosphere.

But how do I get rid of these thoughts? How do I become what I’m supposed to be?

I take my seat, giving Basil a smile from across the room. He does not smile back. There’s something dire about his brown eyes today. He knows something is wrong with me.

Once class lets out, I manage to disappear in the crowd without speaking to him. And again after our last class of the day, while everyone is herding for the shuttles. I know that my missing the train will do nothing but add to Basil’s suspicions, but I don’t know what to do. The thought of riding the train is making it hard for me to breathe.

I hurry past the hedges and into the woods. I don’t know if Judas will be here, or if he’ll come out to see me either way. Amy will still be in academy. That is, if she’s attending classes. Her family will be allowed another week of mourning before they’re expected to return to society.

Still, I find myself heading for the cavern, longing for the days when it was just a fun hideaway, a pretend house where Pen and I served pretend tea.

Someone touches my shoulder, and I start.

Basil turns me around to face him.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says.

My heart is pounding, less from being startled and more now from the weight and effort of keeping secrets from him. He always knows when something is amiss with me. I fight to keep my voice even, but it still comes out too breathy. “It’s fine. I was just going for a walk.”

“Alone?” he says.

“You can come if you want.” I start moving away from the cavern, in the direction of the lake. It’s bad enough that Judas saw Pen as an invasion; I don’t want him to think I’m revealing his location to everyone I know.

“I didn’t see you at lunch,” Basil says. His knuckles touch mine, and somehow in the next instant we’re holding hands. I don’t think either of us initiated it—it just seems to happen. “Pen said you’re struggling with math and had to get a tutor.”

An amazing friend, Pen. Explaining one problem away with another.

I look at my shoes as I walk. I don’t want to lie to him, so I keep silent.

“Morgan,” he says. “It’s going to be a quiet sixty years if you refuse to tell me things.”

That’s how long we have left—not quite sixty years, give or take a few months. At age seventy-five, we’ll be dispatched in order to make room for new births. To live beyond our useful years would be selfish. That’s how we show our gratitude to the god in the sky. We live our lives, and then when we have no more to give but our lives, that’s what we do. We send our ashes up for the sky god to collect. The ashes become part of a current, a force, instead of just one body. It’s called the tributary—a perfect harmony of souls. Until then, we’re all living on borrowed time, on a floating city he allows in his domain with his clouds and his stars.

Long before our dispatch dates, though, we’ll live in dodder housing. The dodder grows in thin yellow wisps and is bald of any leaves. It tends to twine itself around more viable plants, unable to fully thrive on its own. In our later years, once we’ve raised our children and given our vital years to our trade, we become like the dodder plant, and it’s time for us to retire until our dispatch date.

I think about how long sixty years is. How long can Judas keep hiding? Even his confidante, Amy, will soon be old enough that her betrothed will be a priority. No more sneaking into caverns to keep Judas company.

He’ll have to be caught. Internment is only as big as the king’s fist, like Pen said. And then Judas will be executed because no jury is going to believe he’s innocent. All I ever hear at the academy are whispers about the charges against him. That they found fire-starting materials in his apartment, bloody razors, angry letters. I’ve seen no proof, only words, but words can be powerful. Words can be what puts a boy to death.

“I’ve been thinking about the murderer, and about Daphne Leander,” I admit. At least it’s part of the truth.

I take another step, and at once I’m ensconced in a ray of light. Hot and blinding. “Basil?” I say. “Do you think Internment is what it seems?”

He moves closer, until he’s in the same patch of sun. He tilts my chin, and when I raise my head to look at him, his eyes are marred with strands of gold. “I don’t think anything is what it seems,” he says.

I fall against him, wrap my arms around his neck. It feels good. It feels familiar and warm and right where I’m meant to be. Something as simple as his chin on the crown of my head makes me feel like a normal girl.

“Morgan?” he says. He feels the shudder that runs up my spine and he tightens his arms around my back. The moment couldn’t last as it was. Being safe, being normal—it’s only ever an act with me.

“I want to stay here,” I say. “I don’t want to move.”

“Why?” His fingers are under my hair, the warmth against my neck raising the skin into little bumps.

Why? Because one day I’ll be declared irrational. There’s something wrong with my brother and me. The king’s official knows it; that’s why she took such an interest in me. I wonder if it was always this way, if there’s something in our blood. When I was younger, all of my instructors had high expectations for me, being the little sister of one of their top students. But then he jumped, and as Lex became something different to everyone around him, so did I. There is no more high standard, only the worry that I’ll fail too.

“I’m not—” My voice falters, or maybe I just lose my courage.

They’ll fill me with elixirs until I’m somnambulating through the rest of my life, to numb this madness inside me that will surely progress.

“I’m not right. I don’t want to lie to you anymore.”

“You’re shaking,” he says, easing us down into the grass until we’re facing each other. His hands move down the length of my arms and come to hold my wrists. “What have you been lying about?”

“Lex,” is the first word I think to say. “I’m turning into Lex.”

“You aren’t making any sense,” he says. “What do you mean you’re turning into him?”

“I wasn’t with a tutor at lunch,” I say. “I was with the king’s specialist. That lady who spoke with all of us after the broadcast about the murder. I don’t know what she wanted with me. I don’t know how she
knew
. She just kept asking all of these questions about my family, and she asked if I had thoughts about the edge. I lied, Basil. I told her that of course I didn’t think about the edge. But I do. I dream about it. I want to know what will happen if I cross the tracks. I don’t want to jump; I just want to look down. I want to see what’s down there with my own eyes, not through a scope.”

I wait for Basil to pull me to my feet and drag me straight to the clock tower’s affairs office to report all of this, but he only says, “Even if you were able to look over the edge without the winds hurting you, you wouldn’t see much. It would just be patches of land. It wouldn’t be any different from what’s captured through the scope.”

“What if I’m lured the way Lex was lured?” I say. “What if one day I can’t stop myself and I walk right over the edge?”

“You didn’t tell any of this to the specialist?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Did your parents ask her to meet with you?”

“They don’t know,” I say. “The headmaster thought it best that I don’t bother them.”

He seems angry, which reignites my nervousness. It takes so much to upset him.

“Don’t tell this specialist any of what you told me,” he says.

“I couldn’t,” I say. “I barely had the courage to tell you. I thought you’d say it was wrong.”

He leans toward me until our foreheads are touching, our eyes downcast. “You aren’t wrong, Morgan.” Waves of coldness and heat bloom in my stomach. “Not at all.”

I don’t know how it happens. We move our faces at the same time, and then our lips are touching. I’ve lost my worries. Traded them in for the sun and the taste of his tongue and the thought that in sixty years we’ll be ashes—we’ll be tossed into the air and after a moment of weightlessness we’ll be everywhere and nowhere. But for now there’s quick breathing and the feeling like he has my heart in his palm as it beats outside my chest.

He knows that I’m not like the other girls—the normal ones—that a part of me is slipping off this floating city, and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.

Maybe we’re both beyond saving.

T
HE FIRST KISS LINGERS. IT TRAVELS AWAY from the lips once it’s over, and it breaks apart and settles in strange places. The stomach. Fingertips. Knees. It follows us along the cobbles and onto the train.

The train’s rumbling rattles my ribs. It’s late enough now that the train is crowded with workers on their evening commute, and the noise is like bugs that have gotten trapped inside the car, vaguely thrumming. I feel as though a layer of my skin has been peeled away, leaving me chilled, my senses heightened.

Basil keeps me fastened to his side, as though to protect me from the crowd. He kisses my temple, and I close my eyes, reveling in the sensation of it. Now that we’ve had that first kiss, the tension is severed. He can kiss me a thousand times. Ten thousand.

Then, too soon, the train rolls to a stop and his arm around me tenses to keep us steady for the final jolt. I stand with the feeling that I’m being awoken.

Alice told me that the first kiss would leave a girl feeling strange. I wasn’t prepared for how right she was.

We take our time walking back to the apartment building. I watch a cloud swirl over the atmosphere. On very overcast days when the sky goes entirely white, it’s like Internment is an inking on a piece of paper, and the rest has yet to be drawn.

“Do you have to see the specialist again?”

“Every day, until I hear otherwise,” I say.

I see in his face that he’s unhappy, but it isn’t because of anything I’ve done; he’s being protective. I’m glad I told him. I’d want him to tell me, if it were the other way around. “I’m not going to bother my parents with it,” I say. “They’ll worry. They’ll think they’ve done wrong by us. First Lex and now me.”

He stops me a few paces before the door to my building, takes my hands. “If you feel like going to the edge, come and find me,” he says.

It takes me a moment to work up the courage to look at him. “What if you can’t stop me?” I say. “What if I go mad and I jump?”

He squeezes my hands. “I won’t let you go alone.”

It may be the greatest thing anyone has ever said to me, and my smile is too small to express my gratitude.

“Shall we go inside?” Basil says.

“Not yet,” I say, looking to the clouds again. This afternoon has been one long moment that I haven’t wanted to end. I want Basil beside me a little longer. I want this warmth in my cheeks to stay.

He puts his hand on the small of my back, and I feel the current of my blood flowing under his touch. “You could walk with me to the playground,” he says. “I’m supposed to find my brother before dinner.”

“All right,” I say.

The playground isn’t far from the park, which means we’re undoing our train ride by going there, but Basil doesn’t seem to mind. Time is passing too quickly, though I keep willing for it to hold still.

There’s only one child left on the playground, hanging by his knees from the dome of metal bars.

“Leland,” Basil calls, and the boy topples clumsily to his feet.

“He’s gotten better,” I notice. “Last time he was falling on his head.”

“He practices on the furniture,” Basil says, and sighs.

“Is it dinnertime already?” Leland asks, dusting his knees as he ambles toward us. The necklace that holds his betrothal band has fallen against his collar so that the band is behind his neck. Basil stoops to fix it.

“Almost,” Basil says. “Where’s your tie?”

“I lost it.”

“Lost it where?”

He shrugs. Leland has never been a child who can hold on to things; he’s careless even by the standards set by other seven-year-olds. He does his best to seem contrite for Basil’s sake, an effort that’s less than valiant. He scratches the bridge of his nose. “Hi, Morgan.”

“Hi, kid,” I say. I try not to laugh at Basil’s fretful expression. “The tie will turn up somewhere,” I say.

“It’s the third one you’ve lost this year, Little Brother,” Basil says.

“Or maybe it’s been the same tie being found and reissued to me all along,” Leland says, walking ahead. “We’ve never seen more than one at a time.”

“Interesting theory,” I say.

He beams. “Are you coming for dinner?”

“Another night,” I say. Basil and I quicken our pace to keep up with him. Leland is all skips and twirls, always in motion. I think he’ll become something theatrical, or at the very least some kind of athlete.

Or an explorer. The thought comes to me now and again, though I know it isn’t logical. Explorers are for stories about the people of the ground. Explorers are for those who weren’t born in a city that has been interned in the sky.

“There wasn’t even a patrolman watching the playground,” Basil says, quiet enough that his brother won’t hear.

“There never used to be,” I say. “When we were little, sometimes it was dark out by the time we went home for dinner.”

“That was then,” Basil says. Too late, he realizes the worried expression on his face and tries to smile for my sake.

I catch his arm and stop him from walking. “Nobody is going to hurt Leland,” I say.

He locks his arms around the small of my back and draws me to his chest. I feel like a jar filled with lightbugs that have burst suddenly into flight. How can our little world be unsafe? How can it be anything but perfect?

Several paces ahead, Leland has made a game of leaping among the biggest cobblestones. He won’t end up like Daphne; of course he won’t. He is brimming with so much energy and life, not even death would be able to catch him as he skips toward the melting sun.

I wonder if the people of the ground ever feel that their children are too big for their world, too.

After dinner, my mother settles on the couch with her sampler. I sit on the floor with my homework spread out in front of me, but sometimes my gaze wanders to the underside of the fabric. I watch as the arches become stitched full with color. Whatever the colors mean, it has my mother in a good mood. She’s humming.

But it doesn’t take long, of course, for the headache elixir to exhaust her. She stoops down to kiss me before she goes to bed.

I finish up my equations sheet and wait for the soft snoring that means my mother is asleep, before I take my unfinished leftovers from the cold box and wrap them in a few sheets of water-soluble cloth. That way the evidence can be tossed into the lake. I don’t know if I’m trying to protect Judas, or myself.

When I open the door, a slip of paper flutters from the doorjamb. I unfold it, revealing Pen’s swirling, flawless handwriting:

M—

I know where you’re going.

Don’t leave without me.

—P

My natural inclination is to include her, the way I’ve always included her. But Judas barely trusts me, and Amy is starting to—I can see it. Bringing Pen along would scare the both of them off. Amy is the one, after all, who answered Pen’s question to indicate that we were dealing with a murderer.

For all the secrets Pen keeps for herself, surely she can allow me this one.

The cavern is empty when I arrive. Maybe Judas and Amy have decided not to trust me after all.

I leave the food anyway.

There are no further broadcasts, but news travels anyway. On the train the next morning, the word has spread that the jury selection for Judas Hensley has begun. Everyone is murmuring.

Pen isn’t paying attention. She breathes onto the window and writes her name in the fog.

“Such a clear day,” Thomas says. “We can almost see the ground.”

I look over Pen’s shoulder, and “almost” is the best way to describe any notion of seeing the ground. All I see is the wooden fence that borders the train, and then the sky and Internment’s uninhabited outskirts. If I were standing on the edge, then maybe I would see the patchwork of land that is captured by the scopes.

The thought of the edge has caused me to clench my fists. Basil touches my wrist.

Pen is someplace far away. With a flourish and a sigh, she rests her head against my shoulder and watches her name fill up with daylight in the window and then disappear.

Ms. Harlan pours us each a second cup of tea toward the end of our session.

I would love to believe that she’s trying to help me, but her presence only serves to make me anxious. She asks how I’m sleeping and how frequently my mother takes her elixirs. She asks about my brother and even about Alice. Stoic Alice who never flinches even when things are at their worst. Even when she was on the verge of becoming a loner forever.

“I understand your sister-in-law underwent a termination procedure,” Ms. Harlan says.

I stare at the bell that’s near the ceiling, willing it to ring.

“Yes,” I say. “Three years ago.”

“Was she ill afterward?” Ms. Harlan asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I was too young to have paid much attention.” This is a lie. I remember everything about the weeks to follow. I remember wondering how it was that Alice could be physically healthy, while it seemed so very possible the grief alone could kill her.

“I understand that you were young. Thirteen, was it?” Ms. Harlan says. “But do you remember anything at all about her or your brother being angry with the king? Questioning the rules that keep Internment functioning?”

“No.” Also a lie. I had never seen Lex so angry in my life.

“It’s all right. They aren’t going to be in any trouble,” Ms. Harlan says. “Questions are normal after procedures like that.”

“I really wouldn’t know,” I say.

Procedures. Like “incident,” this is another word that covers a broad range of unpleasant things. There is the termination procedure. The dispatch procedure. The dusting procedure that reduces bodies to ash. The mercy procedure that dispatches the infants who are born unwell. Lex wrestled with these things constantly as a pharmacist. I would never hope to know the things he has seen.

Mercifully, the bell rings. I’m gone even before the tea has had a chance to cool.

Basil is waiting for me outside the headmaster’s office, and immediately I go under his waiting arm, and he steers me away from Ms. Harlan and her questions. It’s Friday, but the thought that I’ll have two days free of questioning does little to settle me.

“What did she say?” Basil asks.

“She knows,” I say softly. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s something about my family.”

After class, Pen and I walk to Brass Beans Trinket Shop. It’s a little toy store modeled after a storybook castle, complete with a balcony atop a tower. We don’t actually have castles—they’re too large and impractical—but the notion of them has existed for as long as Internment has been above the ground, like a secret we were never meant to have. Or maybe the stories of castles on the ground are untrue, and we dreamed them up for ourselves. Even the princess has said she longs to live in one; our centuries-old clock tower is as close as she’ll come to that.

Pen and I fell in love with the trinket shop when we were toddlers and never quite outgrew it. We have an annual tradition of picking out our festival of stars gifts here and exchanging them early.

Though the people of Internment don’t exchange gifts for birthdays, Pen’s and my festival gifts also double as late birthday presents, because it marks the anniversary of our friendship. Her birthday is only a handful of days after mine; in fact, that’s how our mothers met and how we came to be friends. She was part of an October batch of due dates, while I was to be part of a November group, right along with Basil. But in late October, my mother was rushed to a hospital room with early labor pains, just as Pen’s mother was being dismissed from it with false labor. We were both eventually born that week—I too eager, and Pen too hesitant.

“Do you suppose we’ll come here even when we’re in dodder housing?” I ask.

“I intend to die young,” Pen says, tapping at each in a row of tiny wooden princes and princesses. “Tragically, I hope. You’re immortalized if that’s how you go.”

“Be serious,” I say.

“This is no place for that,” she says. She hoists a small metal insect in the palm of her hand. She squints at its tail, reading the tiny label affixed to it. It’s modeled after a quartet flutterling, if the four wings and long tail are any indication. I see them by the water, mostly.

Pen tugs at a tiny thread on its back, and with a mechanical whine it takes flight, spiraling busily around our heads. She squeaks with delight.

She intends to die young, she says. I think she’d make a brilliant old woman, though, surrounded by toys and tonics, saying crude things and flinging water balls at the young lovers holding hands.

The quartet flutterling lands on her shoulder. “I want this,” she says. “Think how much more fun it’ll be when we’re drunk off tonic.” It has happened only a handful of times, and mostly in the year following Lex’s incident. Pen would bring a bottle of her mother’s spirits to our cavern and tell me it would take the sting out. For a couple of hours it did, I suppose, but my life was still waiting for me in the morning, and I’d have to face it with a headache.

“I want you to have a gift you can enjoy while you’re sober,” I say.

She hugs the flutterling protectively to her shoulder. “I will. Do you see anything you’d like?”

I stare at a row of bound journals. Like all other books on Internment, the blank pages in those journals are recycled. They’ll be mostly white, but there will be shadowy flecks, bits of someone else’s handwriting, fragments of old images. Pure white pages are expensive and rare; my brother has the scrolls for his transcriber only because they’re considered necessary for the blind, and the words are printed with indents so he can feel them, which is why the paper must be unblemished.

I saw him rip apart a manuscript in a fit of frustration one afternoon, and I wanted to scream.

“Not yet,” I say.

“We could try upstairs,” Pen says, petting her new toy. “Do you need to get something for Lex?”