Perfect Ruin (9 page)

P
EN HAS A POWERFUL SKILL IN GOING FROM defiance to contrition. She is all “Yes, sir” and timid nods the entire way down the hall. As the headmaster turns to open his office door, she smirks at his bald spot.

“Ladies,” he says, standing aside to let us in.

“Yes, sir,” we murmur, heads down.

We file past the receptionist, who does nothing to hide her surprise that among all the mischief makers she’s seen in this academy, we’re the latest—a star student and a patrolman’s daughter. The headmaster leads us to his office and closes the door behind us.

“There now,” he says. His chair creaks under his weight and he gestures for us to sit in the chairs on the other side of his desk. Pen fans her skirt daintily over her knees.

“The obvious question here is what you were both doing outside during academy hours. The second question—and I do believe this is the most important—is why you were trying to enter through a window rather than a door.”

He waits for our answer. Pen glances at me, clears her throat. “We were talking,” she says.

“Talking?”

She raises her shoulders, feigning embarrassment. “Female matters, sir. I’m a little more—seasoned—than Morgan and she was asking me for advice regarding a private conundrum with her betrothed.”

Headmaster Vega clears his throat and straightens a stack of papers on his desk, clearly flummoxed. There’s a bit of a blush across his dark face. “Why couldn’t these matters be discussed during your lunch period?”

“Lack of privacy, sir,” Pen says. My face is burning and I want to kick her, I want to kick her, I want to kick her. It isn’t the lie she’s telling so much as how much she’s enjoying my reaction. At an age when intimacy between betrotheds is a distinct possibility, parents and academy officials try to stay uninvolved for the most part. It was the one topic she could broach without being challenged.

“We would have used the door, but Morgan didn’t want her betrothed to know we’d left.” As if taking a cue from a stage director, she looks at her lap and blushes. “We were trying to execute discretion. Sir.”

Headmaster Vega clears his throat again. “I see. Given that this is a first offense for both of you, I see no need to summon your parents. I trust that from now on you’ll keep your private affairs outside academy hours. This is an institute of formal learning.”

“Yes, sir,” she says.

“Sorry, sir,” I say. My mouth has gone dry.

Headmaster Vega scrawls something onto a piece of paper and hands it to Pen. “You can head to your next class, Ms. Atmus. Stay for a moment, Ms. Stockhour.”

Pen is just as perplexed by this as I am, but she doesn’t question it. She squeezes my shoulder as she takes her leave, obeying the headmaster’s signal to close the door behind her.

After the humiliation I’ve just endured, it is with great effort and embarrassment that I meet the headmaster’s eyes. He picks up on my anxiety and says, “You aren’t in any trouble, but I was hoping to speak with you.”

“Yes, sir?”

“As you know, an academic record is kept of every student from their kinder years. In the last three years, your grades have faltered. You aren’t struggling by any means, but when a record goes from flawless to flawed, it is noticeable.”

This has nothing to do with being caught outside the academy. But that does nothing to quell my anxiety, because before the headmaster says another word, I already can see where this is heading.

“Your family has had a rough go of things since your older brother’s incident. I understand it left him disabled.”

“Functionally disabled,” I amend. There are those who have been dispatched after jumping from the edge damaged their cognitive functions. There are those who died on their own. “He’s still able to contribute a trade.” His identification card used to say he was a medical student. He threw it away after his incident, and Alice quietly retrieved it from the recycling. She keeps it hidden among her jewelry, and I’ve seen her take it out sometimes, turn it over and over in her palm. She loves my brother entirely, even the parts of him he’d like to forget.

I don’t like talking about Lex to people I barely know. It isn’t enough that I could have lost him, but what happened is a pall that will hang over my family for always. When it happened, my friends distanced themselves, one by one, until only Pen remained with that unwavering loyalty of hers. My father busied himself in his work, protecting Internment when his own son proved to be beyond protecting. My mother has been half herself.

Headmaster Vega attempts to smile. “I’ve only received happy reports from your instructors, and though one or two have said you’re a bit of a daydreamer”—Newlan—“it’s clear that you’re a bright girl. I’m concerned that something is holding you back. I know that you met with the king’s specialist, Ms. Harlan, and she informed me that she gave you a card with her home address, but that you haven’t called on her.”

“I didn’t want to impose,” I say. That’s not true. I’ve been considering it. I came so close to telling Basil.

“I’d like you to meet with her,” he says. “I gather that part of your hesitation comes from not wanting to burden your parents, am I right?”

Reluctantly I nod. It’s the absolute truth.

“I don’t think there’s any reason to make them worry, then, provided you’re willing to meet with Ms. Harlan during your lunch period. You may bring a cafeteria tray with you. How does that sound?”

He’s asking, but it’s not really a question. The headmaster is an authority figure, and authority figures don’t make suggestions to students. They tell. Until we become the property of our spouses, we are the property of our educators.

“This matter will be met with discretion,” he says. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

When I don’t answer, he says, “This is a matter more common than you might think. Many students receive counseling for a number of different reasons, and it all turns out fine.”

Fine. I mouth the word at my lap, desperate for the taste of it. What I wouldn’t give for things to turn out fine.

“All right,” I say.

He smiles, all the creases in his pudgy face curling like the wind the sky god conjures in my textbooks. “There will be no need to sneak off the premises to seek counsel from your classmates. I hope we have an understanding.”

“We do, sir.”

“Wonderful.” He scribbles an excusatory note on a piece of paper and hands it to me. “You’re dismissed. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

After classes, Pen and I linger on the outskirts of the playing field, watching the athletes chase one another within the confines of the low stone wall that marks game territory. Basil and Thomas are on opposing teams, and I could swear they’ve turned their practice into a private competition to impress us. Thomas is about as tall as Basil, quick and lean while Basil is more solid. It could be anyone’s win.

It’s an especially windy day, which is common for the short season. I bunch my fists inside the sleeves of my red academy sweater as we sit and watch them.

“Look at that,” Pen says. “If I were one of those poor, dumb, love-struck girls, I’d say there’s nothing in the sky more fetching than that, our boys with their sleeves rolled up, going at each other like beasts.”

I wonder if she knows her hand is to her chest. Her face goes flat. “Thomas doesn’t look too bad from this distance, does he? What a disappointment to know he’s not so exquisite up close.”

“He’s perfectly attractive,” I say.

“He has a nose like a broken bridge.”

“Oh, he doesn’t,” I say.

“You want him for yourself, is that it?” Pen says. “Have him. I’ll trade you your day-old compost scraps. At least then I could use them to grow something I could stomach.” She is smiling as she watches him, though. I watch the boys, too, trying to follow Basil across the field, the beads of sweat making his hair jagged when he doubles over to catch his breath.

I wrap my arms around Pen’s shoulders and lean my head against hers. “I hope we live in apartments next door to each other once we’re grown and married,” I say.

“I’ll be a mapmaker by then,” she says, “penning maps by candlelight until all hours. Maybe I’ll turn irrational. But not the bumbling, stupid irrational. The quiet sort, whispering things to glass jars as though they’ll hold my secrets. No one will ever know.”

There’s a moment of silence before she snorts and giggles. I can never tell when she’s being serious. She seems to prefer it that way.

“Hey,” she says. “I have to get something from the art room. Come with me.”

“I think Basil wanted to walk home with me.”

“We’ll be right back,” she says, and tugs me to my feet. She leads me into the academy, up the stairs, to the art room.

There’s a sort of eerie peace to an empty classroom. The easels display colorings like windows, each one a distorted view of Internment. I know which one is Pen’s even before she has marched over to it. The easel’s ledge is a mess of coloring pens, and bladder sacks haphazardly tied shut with twine, fat with colors. The bladders of small animals are the most common way of storing colors; paper wouldn’t do the job, and collapsible metal was deemed too wasteful when an inventor proposed the idea a hundred years ago. The colors themselves are made from plants.

She’s colored the glasslands the way they would look late in the afternoon, the domes and spires mirroring the orange sky and smoky clouds. She’s memorized that place. Not only does her father work there as a sun engineer, but she has a perfect view of it from her bedroom window.

She frowns at her work. “My contribution to the festival,” she says. “The instructor thinks it’s quite good. She wants me to color it in the center of the clock tower canvas, assuming we get the king’s approval.”

“Really?” I say.

She shrugs.

Every year, a large canvas is prepared by the city’s most talented artists. For the final week of December, the king allows the canvas to be wrapped around the clock tower. There’s a final week of festivities under that canvas, and even the rarely seen prince and princess come out to mingle.

“Pen, that’s a huge honor,” I say. “Why don’t you seem at all excited?”

In answer, she tears her coloring from the easel and crumples it in both hands. The colors are still wet, and oranges and grays stain her fingers. “It wasn’t right,” she says. Gritting her teeth, she pushes the balled paper together before yanking it into two pieces.

She drops the ruined project into a recycling tube, where it’s immediately sucked away, leaving a smear of color on the rim.

“How could you say that?” I say. “It looked perfect.”

“It was going to bother me all night knowing it was just sitting here all wrong,” she says. “I’ll make something better tomorrow. A portrait, maybe. You can be my model.”

“I thought the assignment was to color the city,” I say.

She shakes her head. “The assignment was to color something we love.” She gestures to the easels, full of colorings. “Clearly, everyone loves Internment. But I’ve decided you’re a more interesting part of my world than a bunch of buildings.”

“Maybe you should color the clouds,” I say.

“It’s been done a thousand times,” she says. “Really, Morgan. I’m disappointed in you.”

“Forgive me,” I say. “We aren’t all creative geniuses.”

We make it to the doorway before she runs back to her easel and takes the slenderest of the coloring pens. She wipes the bristles on a scrap of cloth and places it in her skirt pocket. “I’ll work on it at home,” she says.

I don’t know very much about art—that has always been Pen’s area—but I do believe that it is honesty at its core. I look at the smear of color on the recycling tube, and I worry that there’s something Pen’s trying to hide.

I can’t sit in the apartment any longer. I can’t listen to my mother’s rasped breathing as she sleeps in Lex’s blanket, and Alice’s shoes upstairs. She has a pair of wooden shoes that Lex favors. They’re loud and he always knows where she is when she’s wearing them. Normally the sound doesn’t bother me, but tonight I can’t seem to concentrate on anything but those steps. Pacing this way and that.

Yes.
That word keeps coming back to me.

Are you a murderer?

Yes.

Yes.

Alice moves across the common room.

I put on a sweater and leave the apartment.

A patrolman holds open the door for me, tells me to be safe. I hear that every day. Be safe. I wonder what the patrolmen are doing to catch the supposed murderer. I wonder what they’re doing to catch the person who really killed Daphne Leander. There was some talk at the academy about a memorial service. It was held on Monday for family only. No friends were invited, if she had any friends—from what I’ve heard, she and Judas kept to themselves, a trait that gave them a reputation for being snobs. But I’ve learned not to take stock in what people say. I can only imagine what’s been said about me since Lex’s incident, and about Pen, who distances herself from all the high-ranking cliques at the cost of being my friend. “Who needs them?” she says.

The park is empty when I arrive. Little winged insects keep their chorus in the brush. I tread quietly, listening for patrolmen. Listening for Judas.

Only when I reach the cavern do I dare turn on my pocket light, angling it inside. But I find no messages written on the wall with a pebble. And I don’t find Judas.

Instead, curled under a red academy sweater, I find Amy Leander fast asleep.

T
HERE’S A STRIP OF FABRIC TIED AROUND her wrist, the traditional mark of grieving after a loved one has been dusted to ashes and scattered. The academy sweater she uses as a blanket must have belonged to her sister.

Under the sharp blue-white glow of my pocket light, her face is young and troubled, her eyebrows pushed together. I’ve been watching her for only a few seconds before something moves behind me and an arm hooks around my throat.

Even before he has spoken, my heart is pounding up my spine, and I know the soft, measured breaths against my ear belong to Judas Hensley.

“Back away,” he whispers. “Don’t make a sound.”

I suppose he means to be threatening, this boy who answered
yes
, but somehow I know he won’t hurt me. He’s only trying to protect the sleeping girl. I do as he instructs, until we’re both standing outside the cavern. He lets go of my neck, circles around so that he’s facing me.

“Are you having fun?” he hisses.

I focus on all the sharp angles of his face, neck, and collarbone. I can’t help it; I’ve not seen anyone like him, the way he seems sculpted from shards of broken glass. “Bringing your academy friends here to play games and write messages?”

“Why did you lie?” I say. He stares in response, and I begin to worry that my instinct is wrong, that he did kill his betrothed and that he’ll kill me, right here with no witnesses. Maybe Amy wasn’t sleeping. Maybe she was dead, or dying. I try to remember if I saw her breathe.

But my instincts about people have never been wrong. Not even about Lex. The morning of his incident, he came into the room after my mother had finished coloring my cheeks with pink powder. I wasn’t quite the right age for cosmetics to be acceptable, and I was holding a wet cloth, preparing to wipe it away before academy. We looked at each other in the mirror, Lex and I, and I had a terrible feeling like he was going to do something desperate. But he only asked our mother if she’d fixed the tear in Alice’s pink dress.

“Lie?” Judas says at last. I try not to show my relief.

“My friend asked you if you were a murderer. You said yes.”

“Not that it is any of your concern, but I didn’t write that,” he says. “I have a spy handling my correspondence.”

I glance at the cavern, where Amy is asleep. “A little spy?” I ask. “Blond hair, blue eyes?”

Amy’s presence, perplexing as it is, adds to my relief. She wouldn’t be here if she thought Judas had murdered her sister.

“You should leave,” Judas says. “Now.”

And here comes the moment of decision, because I believe him. I believe that something permanent will change if I don’t turn for those trees and return to my apartment and try to study to the sound of Alice’s shoes. I don’t know what will happen if I stay, and I don’t know why I do.

When I don’t take a step, he growls. Muscles move in his throat.

His eyes look better, not so swollen. His hands are no longer bleeding.

“Why isn’t anyone looking for you?” I say. “How did you escape?”

He folds his arms, laughs in tandem with a breeze that comes through the leaves, the woods shaking around us like paper bells.

“Because no one can be smarter than a patrolman?” he says. “No one can be smarter than your father?”

This is meant to offend me, but it doesn’t. I have seen my father concede to utter defeat in the hospital room. I’ve heard him choke on sobs and whisper angry things to the god of the sky when he thought I was asleep at Lex’s bedside. I know that those uniforms are worn by men—only men.

“They are looking for me,” he says. “The king probably doesn’t want to announce that he was foolish enough to let a prisoner escape. Wouldn’t want people to think he’s lost control.”

“The woods is the first place they’d look,” I say.

“There’s plenty of evidence elsewhere,” he says. “And as I said, I have a spy.”

“A little girl,” I challenge. “And her parents must be looking for her.”

His next laugh comes sadder. Something stirs in the cavern and we turn our heads.

Amy Leander is small as she crawls out into the starlight and shadows. She’s wearing the red sweater now, and it falls halfway to her knees as she stands, her eyes trained warily on me.

“Your father’s a patrolman,” she says, the words something between an accusation and an observation. “Is that why you keep following me?”

“No,” I say. “Is that why you ran away from me? You thought I’d turn you in for hanging up those essays?”

She stares at me a moment longer, then looks to Judas, who tells her, “Those were a bad idea. I told you they draw too much attention.” He nods to me in indication.

“My father doesn’t know I’m here,” I say. “I’m not planning to tell him.”

“What about your friend?” Amy asks. “The one with the curls.”

“Keeps secrets better than anyone else I know,” I assure.

Amy is wary; she stares at me with her dead sister’s eyes. There’s no glitter this time. It’s hard to reconcile that this girl, who can’t be older than eleven, belongs to a jumper group, that a bag from the pharmacy arrives at her front door and that she had the gall to cross the train tracks and peer over the edge.

The feeling that overtakes me as I stare back at her, I realize, is envy.

But there’s curiosity, too. She looks unscathed, but the edge always leaves its mark on those who dare to face it. She must have demons, too. She must recoil from society in agony on bad days.

“You know my brother, don’t you?” I say. “Alexander Stockhour. Lex. He’s in your group.”

Her gaze shoots to the ground. “Has he said anything about me?” she mumbles.

Only that I should stay away.

Judas huffs impatiently. “You still haven’t told us what you’re doing here.”

“I can go wherever I want,” I fire back, surprised when the words come out so steadily.

“You were looking for me,” he says.

“I—” I hesitate, because I can’t come up with a lie fast enough. It’s true, I was looking for him. I should be safe at home doing my assignments and preparing for bed, but instead I’m in the woods because—why? I’m looking for—what?

More. The answer is as confusing and as simple as that. I’m looking for more than what I know.

“I wanted to see if you were okay,” I say. “That’s standard after saving someone from imprisonment, I think.”

“I’m fantastic,” he says. “You’re free to leave now.”

“Judas,” Amy says quietly. His face softens for her. “She isn’t going to tell anyone. She would have by now.”

“I can bring food, if you like,” I say. “My mother always makes too much. She still cooks like there are four of us at home, but really it’s just me.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Will you be here?” I say. “Tomorrow night? If you’re not, I can just leave it here for you.”

“Maybe,” is all he says, before he turns and begins pacing away.

Amy stands between us, gnawing her lip, as if deciding which of us should get her attention.

“Your parents must be worried,” I tell her. “I’ll walk you home.”

“I told you, they won’t know I’m missing,” she says.

I open my mouth to tell her that she’s wrong, of course they’ll notice; how could parents who’ve lost one child not notice the absence of another? But then I remember my own apartment, my father who likely won’t be home before midnight, if at all, and my mother coasting in the haze of her headache elixirs.

“We can just ride the train for a while first,” I say. “Until we both get tired. That’s what I do when I’m not ready to go straight home.”

She’s considering it. She runs her betrothal band back and forth along its chain, her mouth twisting one way and then the other.

Judas calls her from somewhere in the shadows and she turns her head.

He calls again, and she begins moving toward him.

“You can bring food tomorrow, if you want,” she tells me, and then she breaks into a run and disappears into the darkness, after the boy accused of murdering her sister.

My father returns home long after I should be asleep. I’ve been lying in the dark, listening to the train and then the silence it leaves behind. It has gone by three times and I’m still awake.

I hear him pull out a chair, pour water for his tea. He moves down the hall, past my bedroom, and looks in on my mother. Soft words are spoken; the door closes again.

They were once wildly in love, my mother and father. Now they’re just sort of together. Glued to each other by Lex and me and the blood in their rings.

The kettle whistles and then the sound dies away. The quiet becomes too thick; even Lex has stopped pacing in his office.

I slip out of bed and ruffle my hair with my fingers to make it seem as though I’ve been sleeping; my father will worry only if he knows I’ve been awake. Or at least, he used to worry about me. Before Lex’s incident. Back when he still bothered to notice he had a daughter.

“Dad?” I say, stepping into the light of the kitchen.

He’s got a stack of papers on the table, and he turns it over, hiding the words from me. “You’re up late, heart,” he says. “Couldn’t sleep?”

“I heard you coming in,” I say, wringing the hem of my flannel nightshirt.

“I didn’t mean to be loud about it,” he says.

“No,” I say, taking the seat across from his. “I’m glad. I like knowing that you’re home. It makes me feel better.”

“Do you feel unsafe when I’m gone?” he asks. “This building is safe; you know that, don’t you?”

I nod. “It’s just that I worry for you,” I say. “When you’re home, I know you’re okay. That’s all.”

He gives me a tired smile, reaches over the table and pats my hand. “Since you’re awake, would you like some tea?” he says. “There’s enough for two.”

I shake my head. “Dad? What’s going to happen to Jud—to the murderer?”

“What will happen?” my father says, shuffling his papers without turning them over. “That’ll be up to the jury. I don’t believe they’ve begun the selection process yet.”

“Why haven’t they?” I say. “Murder’s a serious charge.”

“I’m not involved with the politics of it,” he says. “The king makes all of those decisions.”

He isn’t meeting my eyes now. He gulps his tea.

“Have you met him?” I press.

“The king?”

“The murderer. Of course you’ve met the king.”

“I’ve seen him in the holding cell. I pass it when I’m turning in my reports each morning.”

“So you saw him today?” I ask.

“I suppose so, yes.”

He’s lying. He’s lying to me.

Maybe I’m lying, too, by keeping what I know from him. It doesn’t make me feel any less betrayed.

“Do you think he’s capable of murder?” I say. “I mean, a student my age?”

He clears his throat. “I’ve got a lot of work to contend with before I have any hope of sleeping tonight. And you have academy in the morning,” he says. “We can talk about this later. You understand, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I murmur.

I understand. Later will never come.

Ms. Harlan taps her pen against her clipboard and tries to smile at me.

I concentrate on not fidgeting.

She asks me about classes and about my betrothed. She notes my reactions and makes direct eye contact when she isn’t writing.

And then, when the lunch period is nearly over, she asks about my family. She wants to know if things have changed since the incident, if any of us have taken medication to cope. Something about the way she asks leads me to believe she already knows the answers and there’s no sense lying.

“We were all medicated at first,” I say. “But it interfered with my father’s work. He has to be alert when he’s called upon. And my parents didn’t like how drowsy the elixirs made me, so I stopped taking them.”

That isn’t the whole truth. I had begun pouring my elixirs down the sink before they took me off them. I didn’t like the heaviness of my limbs, the blackness of my dreams. I didn’t like how sterile they made the world around me seem; I couldn’t think beyond what was in front of me, couldn’t fathom that there was a ground below this floating city, couldn’t wonder at the shapes in the clouds.

The only thing I liked about that awful time was going to the top floor of the hospital. Sometimes I wouldn’t even visit my brother. I would just take the stairs up to the cafeteria on the top floor. That hospital is the second tallest building on Internment, and the cafeteria is made of windows. On an overcast day there’s nothing to see but whiteness. Clouds turning and parting, revealing more clouds. It mesmerized me.

Ms. Harlan takes notes. “And your mother?”

“She suffers from headaches,” I say. “She takes elixirs in the evening, so they won’t interfere with her workday.”

My answers are tidy. They are exactly what our medical records should reflect. Exactly what the king asks of families who’ve had a jumper. I may not know exactly what the king’s specialist is fishing for, but I know that I need to protect my family. It’s easy to give the right answers; all I need to do is pretend everything is as I want it to be.

“How is your relationship with your brother?” she asks.

“He lives upstairs,” I say. “I check in on him sometimes, but his wife takes care of him. She makes sure he attends his support group and takes his prescriptions.”

She smiles again, but these smiles only serve to unsettle me. There’s something artificial about them.

“Are you opposed to medications?” she asks. And before I can answer, she’s lifting a kettle from the portable sun warmer on her desk and pouring me a cup. “I’d like for you to try some of this,” she says. “There’s no medicine in it, but the herbs are said to have a soothing effect. If I can be blunt, Morgan, it sounds as though you’re under quite a bit of stress.”

I ran out to catch the train before I’d had a chance to touch my breakfast this morning, and I’m missing lunch for this meeting, which is perhaps why the spicy sweet smell of the tea seems so irresistible to me right now. She pours a cup for herself, blows into the steam and swirls the cup in her hands. I’ve taken only a sip when the bell rings.