Perfect Ruin (12 page)

A
FTER CLASSES ON MONDAY, BASIL AND I spend time trying to skip stones on the lake. We don’t talk much; somehow that has stopped feeling so necessary.

As we sit on the grass, I watch the sunlight catch bits of gold in his hair and I think that he’s more handsome than the prince. The prince, like his sister, is always at the height of fashion. He’s always polished and there are rumors that he wears cosmetics in his images. But there’s nothing more real than sunlight on skin.

Feeling brave, I push forward and kiss him. He pulls me on top of him, and, laughing, we fall into the grass.

I rest my forehead on his, trying to line up our noses and mouths so we’re at a perfect parallel. He slides his hands up my sleeves and I have the distant sense that Judas is watching us. I wonder if he and Daphne were ever like this.

I try to dismiss the thought, but too late I’m thinking of her body on the train tracks and how awful her final moments must have been.

“Kiss me?” I say, and he does. It’s so easy now. It roots me to this place, makes me feel at home.

I rest my arms on his chest and draw back so I can look at him. He pushes my hair behind my ears and says, “You look worried.”

“I’m only thinking about what sort of person I am,” I say.

“What sort of person?” he says.

“It’s something my brother said. He told me that I’m the sort of person who doesn’t think Internment is enough.” It sounds crazy now that I’ve said it aloud, but I trust Basil now with the things that make me sound unhinged.

“He’s right. Internment isn’t enough for you,” Basil says, surprising me. “Neither is the ground. Neither is the sky.”

I smile. “Being betrothed to me has made you lose your mind,” I say.

He looks around us to be certain we’re alone, and then he says, “With all that’s happened lately, I’m beginning to understand why you’d fantasize about the ground.”

I roll over so that I’m lying beside him. “Maybe I wouldn’t even like the ground. Maybe it would be cruel or ugly. Maybe it would be exactly like here. I just want to know.”

“It wouldn’t be like here,” Basil says. “Think of how much land there must be.”

“That’s just it. I can’t even imagine it.” I hold my arms over my head, watching the way the sunlight fills the spaces between my fingers. “All my life, the more I’ve been told not to think about it, the more I can’t resist. It’s like … like …”

“Like being in love,” Basil suggests.

I turn my head to look at him. “I think you may be right.”

He looks back at me.

“I can stop talking about it so much,” I say. “The ground, I mean. If it bothers you.”

“I do think we should be careful what we say, and where,” Basil says. “There’s too much fear right now, and I worry.”

He turns his face skyward and shields his eyes from the sun, but I think he’s just trying to hide from my stare.

“Worry about what?”

“About what will happen to you,” he says. “Even when we were children, I thought that something like what happened to Daphne could happen to you. One day you’d say something that upset the wrong person, and—We’re supposed to keep each other safe. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Basil.” I move his hand away from his eyes. I want to tell him there’s nothing to be afraid of, but after the honesty he has just given me, I can only give him the same. “We have each other, and we always will, whatever happens. And if someone does murder me, you needn’t worry, because I’ll come haunt you.”

He smirks. “Rattling the windows and tipping glasses and things?”

“I’d say nice things while you slept so you’d have good dreams,” I say. “Or maybe mean things if I get jealous.” I shove his shoulder.

“But we aren’t ghosts,” he says.

“No,” I say. “Not for a long time.”

“Sixty years,” he says.

“A thousand,” I counter, and tug him by the collar until he’s kissing me, and anything we believe is true, and everything in the world is ours.

The short season takes more light from each day. Judas is scarce. I haven’t seen him at all this week, but Amy will still meet me in the cavern. She says he’s hiding in the farm and mining section. She says he has a plan. When I ask her what this plan could be, she tells me that he won’t tell her. It’s too important and she’s too unpredictable.

And one night, I find her sitting out in the starlight at the mouth of the cavern. She’s toying with the strips of cloth tied around her wrists.

“Amy?” I say.

She doesn’t answer, and when I kneel in front of her I see the sheen of tears on her cheeks.

“Suppose it was painful,” she whispers. “All that broken skin.”

She has been so steely that I could almost forget she’s in mourning. She’s never talked about what happened to her sister. Barely mentioned Daphne at all.

“She was going to do something important.” Her voice cracks. “She wasn’t there yet, but it was happening. The things she wrote and the thoughts she had. She was going to prove things are wrong on Internment, and someone didn’t want that, and that’s why she was killed.” She uses the cloth to dab at her eyes. “And now she’s gone, and no one will ever get to hear what she had to say.”

Gently, I ask, “Is that why you were putting up her essay?”

She nods. “It was a draft she didn’t turn in. Instead, our parents made her write about the ecosystem and turn that in. But I had to give her a voice. My parents blamed Judas for her thoughts and the things she said. Before her death, my parents went to the king asking for Daphne and Judas’s betrothal to be undone. They would have preferred that she be alone—rather than tied to him.”

“I didn’t think undoing a betrothal was possible,” I say.

“It isn’t.” She swipes the heel of her hand against her nose, sniffling. “That’s probably why they blame him so much. They were practically the first in line to have him arrested once she was killed. But it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?” I say.

She looks at me, eyes glistening in the moonlight. I see a girl who has been to the edge, and who has nothing left to fear. “Because I’m going to finish what my sister helped start. I’m going to find a way off of this place.”

I can’t help the pitying expression that surely comes over me. She raises her chin in defiance. “I can’t tell you everything,” she says. “But you’ll hear about it, and when you do, I’ll already be gone.”

She doesn’t have anything to say to me after that. She gets up and busies herself trying to climb one of the trees.

“You like to climb?” I say.

“I’m not allowed,” she says. “I can get away with it only when Judas isn’t around.”

I can’t imagine why he would worry about Amy climbing trees. She appears to be quite good at it.

“When I was little,” I say, “I used to climb trees, too. It took me months before I could reach the top of the highest tree I could find here in the woods. And once I’d climbed it I realized there was nowhere else to go.”

Amy’s expression is thoughtful. “Did you ever think about what it would be like to climb in the opposite direction? Instead of going above Internment, to go beneath it?”

“Like a tunnel,” I say. “Yes, I think so, now that you mention it. I could burrow along the roots that go all the way to the bottom of the city, and then I’d be dangling high above the ground.”

“You’re kind of strange,” Amy says, swinging from a low branch.

“You are, too,” I say.

Before she hoists herself up to the next branch, she smiles at me. “Go away now,” she says. “I have important things to consider.”

I leave her to her ascent for the stars.

Somewhere around the block, I hear a sweeper. They always come sometime after dinner. Men driving machines propelled by giant round brushes, gathering all the debris from the street so that it can be recycled.

I pass my apartment, not ready to go home, and keep walking until I reach the border of my city: the train tracks.

And I’m not alone. There is a patrolman at the far end of the platform where the doors will open when the train arrives. And Pen, sitting on the steps of the platform in the light of a street lantern. Paper lanterns hang from the lantern’s post, decorated with slantscript requests.

Under Pen’s long red coat I can see the hems of her pinstripe pajamas and her wool slippers. She grins at me. “Have a fun tryst?” she asks.

“What are you doing out without your shoes?” I say. I think back on what she said about killing Judas if anything ever happened to me, and I wonder if she followed me.

She looks over her shoulder and nods at the silver branches, lanterns, and charms that decorate the train platform. “Thinking about this year’s request,” she says.

I sit beside her. “It’s strange to see Internment so afraid, especially this time of year,” I say.

“It’s important that the festival of stars goes on, no matter what happens,” Pen says. “The fear will pass eventually, as unhappy things always do.” She smiles at the sky, but offers a little nod toward me. “Do you remember how excited we used to get when we were little, and we would try to sneak away with whatever treats your mother was baking for the festival?”

“She knew what we were up to, and she let us get away with our pockets full of mini pastries anyway,” I say.

Pen sighs wistfully.

“I still do love the city this time of year,” I say. “I love the way it looks, the way it feels. I just don’t get excited about the requests anymore.”

“The requesting part is more fun when you’re a child anyway,” Pen says. “Children ask for simple things.”

When I was young I asked for a flutterling farm in a jar, and the next year, for my brother to be nicer to me. Lex struck the match for me both times, never knowing what I’d asked for, and together we watched our papers fly up into a sky of burning stars. My mother bought me the farm, but my brother’s patience with me grows thinner every year. From that festival on, I began to suspect that by being born I disturbed something in his fragile world. I gave him someone to worry about, and he would never forgive me for it.

“The god of the sky has never answered my most important requests,” I say. “Do you suppose it’s because I was never very good at slantscript?”

“No,” Pen says. “I’m rather good at slantscript, and my requests go unanswered lately, too.”

“Maybe this year I’ll offer up a request on Judas’s behalf.”

Pen shakes her head. “Don’t waste your request. There isn’t much that can be done for him now.”

“Do you think Daphne’s essay is right?” I ask.

“All that whatnot about the gods being a myth that we dreamed up to add meaning to our lives?” she says. “It goes against everything we’ve been taught. We’re living on a big rock floating in the sky. How many explanations can there be for that?”

“Maybe there’s a science to it,” I say.

“Medicine is a science,” she says. “Electricity, colors, mapmaking. Those are things that can be crafted. What kind of science could explain how we got here or even why we exist? Of course there are gods.”

“Daphne said the gods are a theory,” I say. “Theories can’t be proven.”

“Daphne is dead, may I remind you,” she says. “You need to get your head back up in the sky with the rest of us. You’re always so fixated on what’s beyond the city. Whatever there is, it isn’t for us. We’ve been interned.”

She’s impassioned by her faith, yet another reason Instructor Newlan adores her. Her next breath moves the hair from her brow. “We didn’t make ourselves,” she says. “We aren’t the greatest things to exist. I can’t believe that. I won’t believe that. We have too many faults.”

“I didn’t mean to get you so riled,” I say.

“I’m not riled, Morgan. Not at all. I’m just concerned that one of these days your daydreaming will go entirely too far.” She fidgets with the hem of her glove.

“I was just discussing.”

She talks of staying in the sky. Yet sometimes she is her own floating city, drifting farther away from me.

“You should think more about the things you choose to discuss aloud,” she says. “Maybe the specialist will leave you alone then.” She was subjected to one of the king’s specialists in third year, when her mother’s tonic addiction prevented her mother from working. That was the year Pen learned to set her own curls.

“I haven’t talked to the specialist about it,” I say. “I don’t like her. She makes me uneasy.”

Pen hugs her arms. “Just lie like the rest of us,” she says as the train approaches. The train’s roar nearly swallows her voice when she says, “And if you must escape, escape here in the city. There are so many places for it.”

The train door opens with a mechanical whine. No one disembarks. The shops are all closed and there’s hardly anyone out at this hour on a weeknight unless they work for the hospital or the king’s patrol. And still, the trains run, keeping vigil over those who dream of leaving the safe world within the tracks.

“I don’t need to escape,” I say.

She leans back on her elbows and looks at the stars. “That’s good,” she says, starting to smile. “See that? You are an apt liar after all.”

The train pulls away from us.

I frown and put my hand over hers. “Please don’t be angry,” I say. I don’t understand her when she gets like this, and it frightens me.

She shakes her head. “I’m not. Really.”

“Were you waiting for me?” I say.

“You aren’t the only one who can sneak off into the night to meet mysterious men,” she says, raising her chin. “It just so happens that I am having a starlit picnic tonight.”

The clock tower strikes its first chime of the tenth hour, and I see a figure in the distance. The figure removes its bowler hat and spins it on its finger. I recognize the sharp click of those shoes on the cobblestones. Thomas moves into the light of a street lantern. This shocks me more than a mysterious man would have.

“Hello,” he says, nodding to the both of us. “I didn’t realize I’d be graced with both of your companies tonight.”