Perfect Ruin (17 page)

W
HEN MY BROTHER JUMPED FROM THE edge of Internment, my father said it was because he had a lot of demons. But long before my brother was a jumper, when he and I were children, my father began collecting demons of his own.

As a patrolman, he fitted anklets on people who had turned irrational. He took part in the quiet dispatches of those who had committed crimes, their deaths later made to seem accidental. He was made to participate and even choreograph ugly things on the promise that these things would keep us all safe. And in the evening he would come home to his happy children and his loving wife and try to reconcile his role as one of the king’s elite.

Lex isn’t sure when our father began to tell my mother of the things that were happening behind the peoples’ backs, but my parents began to talk of changing things. There were other patrolmen and wives who felt the same way, and they began to meet in secret. At first they wondered whether they could persuade the king to change his methods. But this is a king who has ways of killing those who disrupt the order of his city. And the talk soon turned to rebellion. When they met Professor Finnian Leander, who taught technology courses at the university, he introduced the idea that they could leave Internment. Fly away on the wings of a metal bird.

Finnian Leander turned his blueprints and ideas into stories for his granddaughters—Amy and Daphne. “I could never take credit for their imaginations,” Professor Leander interrupts, smoothing his fingers over the face of his clock. “Their minds stretched farther than Internment long before my silly stories.”

“So Daphne became a part of it,” I say. I look to Lex. “What about you? When did Mom and Dad tell you all of this?”

“It was after I jumped,” he says. “At first Dad would whisper about it in the hospital, when he thought I was too far gone to hear him. My eyes were taped shut. He would apologize and say he should have realized the things I’d been seeing as a pharmacist. He should have told me everything sooner. He blamed himself.”

My brother speaks so coolly about it, as though he’s talking of people he’s never met, but I see the way his fingers are fidgeting with the hem of his shirt. This is all hard for him to say.

I finish for him, “And you became a part of it, too.”

He nods. “But I had suspected something like it for a long time,” he says. “I didn’t realize they’d actually built the bird, but I wasn’t surprised.”

He never got to see this place, I realize. Dad told him about it after the incident that blinded him.

“And that’s why they’re dead?” I say. “Because the king found out about it? And Daphne, and the university student?”

“Quince,” Amy says softly.

“Others, too,” Lex says. “There are plenty of deaths that nobody thinks twice about. The king can do away with anyone and make the cause appear to be anything he pleases.”

“Then why was Daphne’s death so public?” I say. I try not to think of the brutality of her demise. It was more than doing away with a nuisance—it was too violent and cruel to be anything but personal. Did the king do it himself, or did he have someone do the dirty work? Was it the prince, with his firm jaw and sparkling eyes?

“The king is trying to make a point now,” Professor Leander says. “He doesn’t know about the bird for certain, but he knows that there is unrest. He knows about the plans to leave the city. We have our suspicions about who may have betrayed our secret. It may have been done under duress. And now not only does the king want to stop us, but he wants to frighten everyone else into thinking that leaving the city is an act of evil. He wants them to think that we’re deranged and violent, so that they’ll fear us and seek his protection.”

Basil presses the back of his hand to my forehead and frowns. I lean into his touch before he draws his hand away. I’m glad he’s here, still by my side after all the trouble I’ve caused him.

“So all of you had this secret,” I say to Lex, an edge to my tone, “and nobody thought it’d be a good idea to tell me?”

“You weren’t burdened by it,” he says. “You didn’t carry the things that we did, and we didn’t want that for you.”

“So—what, you were all going to fly off Internment in a metal bird and just leave me home with a note saying that dinner was in the stove and you wouldn’t be coming back?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “There was no sense putting you at risk before anything was certain. We never would have left you behind.”

I think of the night my father came to my room after Daphne’s murder.
You’re getting old enough now to see life for exactly what it is.
That’s what he said. He must have come so close to telling me before he lost his nerve about it.

I realize I’m shaking. The metal walls are caving in, and all these eyes are on me and it’s getting hard to breathe.

“I need air,” I say.

“You can’t leave,” Alice says, sympathetic. “It isn’t safe for you. The king will have men looking for you.”

“Why?” I say. “None of this has anything to do with me. You all made sure of that.”

Lex laughs bitterly, and it takes all my strength not to hit him. “I guess that specialist saw something in you anyway,” he says. “There are extraordinary things in that head of yours. You don’t even realize the sorts of things you say.”

I try to recall the things I said to Ms. Harlan that might have made me stand out, but there’s nothing. I remember her accusatory stares and her suspicions, but I never betrayed a single thought. I lied each time she asked me about the ground.

I’ve been told I’m a terrible liar, though. There’s that.

Basil tries to put an arm around me, but I pull away. I rise to my feet. I wouldn’t know how to get out of this place even if I could, so when I hurry from the room, I go straight back to the tiny bunk. The green door closes behind me with a slam.

I hear Alice, as practical as ever, saying, “Let her be.”

I pull the blanket over my head and listen to the rush of blood in my ears. I have never been so aware of all my bones, and how heavy my limbs are, and how much effort it takes to breathe in and out.

A little bit of light peeks through the weave in the blanket, and it’s like the stars gleaming in a sky I might never see again.

The quiet here isn’t perfect. It’s filled with clinks and groans, as though I’ve been shrunk down and imprisoned in the engine of some machine. I suppose the truth isn’t far from that.

The doorknob turns eventually. A bit of light reaches me when a piece of the blanket is lifted just enough for Amy to stick her head under. “Hey,” she says.

I just stare at her.

“They told me to leave you alone.”

“And you thought this would be the best way to do that,” I say.

“Move over,” she says, and crawls under the blanket with me. The blanket between us is tented by our shoulders, and in the darkness her eyes are very round. I wonder what it’s like for her, looking so much like a dead girl. When she grows older, she’ll be very nearly a perfect replica of her sister.

“You can’t be afraid,” she tells me. “You can be sad if you like. You can be angry. But it’s the fear that’ll freeze you in place.”

“They think you wandered to the edge accidentally,” I say. “But I think you knew what you were doing, especially when you go saying things like that.”

“Nobody knows what they’re doing at the edge,” she says. “You don’t know what you’ll find there; it’s just that you’ve had your fill of
not
knowing.”

“What was it like?” I say.

“Windy,” she says. “Theory is, the wind is what keeps you from going over the edge. You hear it roaring, and you can’t see anything but sky and bits of the ground through the clouds, and you think you could jump and then you’d be like the birds, sailing down and down until you land in one of those colorful patches. But when you jump, everything goes black, and when you wake up, you’re still here.”

This rivals the news of my parents’ deaths as the saddest thing I’ve heard today.

“There are a lot of dead bugs, too,” she says, her teeth showing as she smiles. She looks like a little girl for once.

“Bugs?” I say.

“Hundreds of them all around the edge, just thrown back onto the grass when they tried to fly off.”

She laughs and I laugh too. I don’t even know why. Maybe I’m in shock.

When we’re quiet again, she says, “I’m sorry your parents are dead.”

I say, “I’m sorry your sister is dead.”

“It won’t be for nothing,” she says. “I’m glad you survived. You’ll get to see what your parents and my sister were working for.”

“Even if we do make it to the ground,” I say, “who’s to say it’s any better? What if there’s another king no less corrupt than ours? Or what if the ground is just another city floating over an even bigger one, and so on?”

“Then at least we’ll be the wiser,” she says. “I’d rather be disappointed than oblivious.”

“Would you now?” I say.

Her smile is back. “But I bet the people down there will be fascinated by us. I bet they’ll feed us their delicacies and give us crowns and ask us all about our city.”

Her notions are as good as mine, I suppose.

“I’d much like for you to be right,” I say.

I
DECLINE ALL OFFERS TO PARTAKE IN A tour of the metal bird.

I realize that this is a phenomenal place, but I’m not in the right mind to appreciate it. I spend the rest of the evening reliving the memory of mother turned away from me on the bed, and the night I sat at the kitchen table with my father as he lied about Judas. He was trying to protect me. If I knew nothing, he thought I wouldn’t be a target. I see that now.

I don’t say very much. Basil worries. Lex has Alice check the dilation of my pupils and he pays close attention to my temperature, asks me to describe any stomach cramps or dizziness. I tell him that I don’t feel much of anything. He has nothing to say to that. He was never very good with emotions. It’s staggering to think he’s the only family I have left.

There are probably patrolmen in the apartment now, rifling through our drawers and looking for signs of treason to justify the murder of an entire family. When they get to my bedroom they’ll find an open textbook at the desk, and the wooden marionette Pen bought for my festival of stars gift. They’ll find blue bedsheets and a closet full of uniforms and a feather headband draped over the mirror. They’ll find pieces of a girl who followed the rules.

That girl is gone now.

There’s no daylight here. There are no clouds. I hear a rumbling that I think is the train up above us. I lie with my face in the mattress, and Basil rubs circles on my back. He says nice things and he stoops down to kiss the back of my neck. Despite this hollowness inside me, the feel of his lips raises bumps in my skin.

I hear the door open, and Alice calls my name.

When I don’t answer, Basil says, “I think she’s fallen asleep.”

Alice doesn’t believe it. When I was younger, there were nights when my parents still went out together, when they would be gone long into the starlit hours, only to return with giggles and whispers, shushing each other as they slammed doors and stumbled off to bed. While they were gone, Alice would look in on me. She would know if I was pretending to sleep, and she would tickle my feet.

She doesn’t touch me now. She only says, “We’ll sort this out, love.” She doesn’t say my name, but I know the words are for me. “You aren’t alone.”

The door closes.

“She’s been crying,” Basil says, lying down beside me.

After a few seconds, I raise my face from the mattress to look at him.

“I don’t want to talk,” I say. I feel like I can’t get the words out in time. They spin angrily in my brain but disappear on my tongue.

“Okay,” he says, and wipes at a streak of my tears with his thumb. “You don’t need to say a word.”

“Never again?” I say.

“Not if you don’t want to. I’ll just read your expressions. Everywhere we go, I’ll speak so you don’t have to.”

I know he isn’t being serious, but it’s a nice thought. Him always at my side, always knowing what I’m thinking until our dodder days are over and we’re dispatched.

Only I don’t know if we’ll be allowed in dodder housing. I don’t know what’s going to happen or where I’ll go if Internment is too dangerous for me.

I close my eyes.

“Want me to turn out the light?” he says.

I shake my head. He tucks the blanket over both of us. It’s rough and unfamiliar, so I wrap my arm around Basil. The boy I’m supposed to spend forever with. He still feels and smells like home.

“What about your parents and brother?” I say.

“They’ll be safer if I don’t try to find them now,” he says. “They had nothing to do with any politics. I can’t imagine they’d be a target.”

He doesn’t sound very sure about that. Their son is betrothed to a girl the king tried to kill, after all.

“You must want to see them,” I say.

“I can’t,” he says, and his voice falters, and I know he’s trying to be strong for my sake. “You heard what they said. It would put everyone at risk—them, you, me, everyone on this bird. My family will understand. They know that my place is with you. I was going to have to leave home eventually.”

I think of Leland running along the cobbles the day we picked him up after class. He’s disappearing in the sunlight and I can’t bring him back.

“But not like this,” I say. “You shouldn’t have to leave home like this.”

“You’ll be killed if the king finds you,” he says. “It was my worst fear that something would happen to you, and I won’t chance it again. If you’re leaving Internment, I’m leaving, too.”

“If I were nobler, I’d beg you to stay with your family,” I say.

“It wouldn’t change that we’re meant to stay together.”

“What if we get to the ground in this flying bird somehow, and there are no rules like that? What would keep us together then?”

“The same thing that’s keeping us together now,” he says.

It’s quiet after that, and I’m left to remember that beautiful, strange thing he said to me before the medicine pulled me under.

I love you.

Is this what love means? That the rules aren’t the reason you stay together?

Buried away from the clock tower’s chimes, I rely on Basil’s wristwatch to know the hour. When he falls asleep, just after midnight, I slide out from under his arm.

“Morgan?”

One foot off the mattress, I freeze. His eyes don’t open, though, and I realize he’s only talking in his sleep.

Carefully I slide the rest of the way out of bed and kneel before him to be sure he’s really asleep. “I’ll be back soon,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”

I close the door behind me when I leave.

The hallway contains a few other bunk rooms like mine. I hear voices behind the closed doors. Professor Leander means for this to be a sort of house if it lands on the ground; his intentions lie in the faucets and electrical fittings that don’t work as of yet.

There’s a spiral staircase that leads me down into a kitchen. It’s mostly dark, save for a little lantern hanging from the ceiling. I walk as softly as I can to avoid creaking floorboards. If the upstairs is the chest, then I wonder what part of the bird this is; the stomach, I suppose.

The lantern lights only a small bit of the room, allowing me to see outlines of cabinets, a stove, and a cold box. There’s also a chandelier hanging over a table on the far end, but I haven’t seen any evidence of working electricity on this bird. It has all been flame lanterns.

No matter, though. I’m able to find the drawers easily enough, and it doesn’t take much rummaging for me to find a knife.

“I hope you weren’t looking to fix a midnight snack. There’s not much food.” Judas’s voice throws my heart into my throat. My shoulders go stiff. He hops onto the counter in front of me and stares at the open drawer. “The professor had big dreams of making this place a second home, but by now he’s accepted that we’ll all be lucky enough if it gets us to the ground without killing us. A one-way journey to be sure.” He eyes the knife in my hand. “May I see?”

I hold the knife out but don’t let him grab it. “There, you’ve seen,” I say, lowering it again.

“A serrated blade,” he says. “Great for slicing bread or potatoes.” He narrows his eyes. “Not so great as an assassination tool, though. You’d want a paring blade for that. Short, easy to conceal, and a pointed edge that would go right to the vital organs.”

“I can’t imagine what you’re getting at,” I say.

“You know,” he says, “if you try to take the king’s life to avenge your parents, you’re likely to get killed by his security before you’ve made it halfway up the clock tower.”

He knows what I’m up to, then. There’s no sense pretending. He reaches into the drawer and selects a paring knife, which he graciously holds out for me to grasp by the handle.

“Are you going to tell the others?” I say.

“They were your parents,” he says, “and this is your decision. I’d advise you to revisit it later with a clearer head, but it’s not my place to stop you.”

“You can come with me, you know,” I say. “The king had a hand in your betrothed’s death. You’ve just as much a right to this grudge as I do.”

“No thanks,” he says. “Believe me, I’ve wanted to. I hate that she’s dead while he’s still breathing. But that isn’t what Daphne was about.”

I wrap the blade in a cloth napkin and tuck it into the waistband of my skirt. “Suit yourself,” I say. “How do I get out of here?”

It’s too dark to be sure, but I think he’s grinning when he points to a door across from us. “There’s a ladder that’ll take you down and out of the bird. We’re pretty far underground, though. Let me go with you and show you how the pulley works.”

He grabs the lantern from the ceiling hook and leads me to the exit. We scale the ladder down a tunnel that leads to a metal door.

“The bird’s all rickety inside,” he says, “but it’s airtight. The professor says the air is thin beyond our atmosphere. He says we’d suffocate on our way down if there were so much as a crack in this thing.”

If my parents were still alive, all of this would fascinate me. I would have questions and I would be certain that I was dreaming, so spoiled would I feel at the idea of the ground being a possibility.

Now the idea of sailing to the ground in a metal bird only stirs a rivulet of blood in my stomach where there should be excitement. I can’t quite bring myself to care. The colors have all dulled around me.

I was a different girl yesterday. I also possessed more patience and sanity.

Judas opens the metal door and bows with a flourish of his arm, the lantern raised to light the way. “After you,” he says. “Watch that first step.”

Beyond the bird, there’s nothing but dirt and rocks. “How far below the surface are we?” I ask.

“Not as far down as you’d think,” he says, hopping from the bird to stand beside me. “The first time I came down here, I thought we were too deep, and that if we kept digging we’d fall right through the bottom of Internment itself.”

I used to think something like this when I was little. I would watch worms wriggle into the dirt and I would imagine that at the bottom of the city there were clumps of worms falling away with pebbles and crumbs.

Judas hands me the lantern. “Here, hold this.”

Holding up the light, I follow him to what appears to be a wooden crate and a series of ropes.

“Your betrothed carried you all the way down here in this thing, you know,” he says. “Can’t have been easy. It’s hard maintaining balance when it’s in motion.”

“He’s strong,” I say.

“It would be a shame for his efforts to go to waste,” Judas says. “It did seem like he wanted you to live.”

He’s so certain I’ll get myself killed. I say nothing as I climb into the rickety makeshift lift. Judas tugs at one of the ropes, and as he pulls, we begin to ascend the tunnel in the earth.

The light catches the freckles of sweat on his throat. “What was she about?” I say.

He tugs at the rope with both hands. “Sorry?” he says.

“You said murdering the king isn’t what Daphne was about,” I say. “What was she like, then?”

He cants his head back, smiles ruefully at the darkness. “She was mad, for starters,” he says. “Everything she stood for revolved around that.”

I envy a dead girl for the look this boy gives her memory. “She must have been something to see,” I say.

“She was going to do big things,” Judas says. He doesn’t sound at all sad about it. “I don’t have her spark, but I’ll have to do in her absence.”

“My friend Pen says Daphne’s essay was a bunch of whatnot. She says we need to keep our heads in the sky where they belong.”

“Your friend Pen is afraid,” he says.

It’s hard to reconcile Pen being afraid of anything.

Judas goes on pulling the rope. “What kind of a name is ‘Pen’ anyway?” he asks. “No way it’s on the naming list.”

There is a list of approved names that is specific about spelling. Because of that, it isn’t uncommon for people to adopt nicknames later on. There are no rules about those. “She doesn’t like her real name,” I say. “When we were in kinder year, there were three other Margarets in our class, and the instructor started calling her Pen because she always had coloring pens in her dress pockets. I suppose she preferred it after a while.”

I peer over the edge of the crate; it’s hard to see how high we are, and in the darkness I can just about see the metal slope of the bird. I can’t tell if it actually looks like a bird. “And anyway, she isn’t afraid,” I say. “She just has a lot of faith in the way things are.”

“That’s the way the king would like it, to be sure,” Judas says.

“Why? If he’s so corrupt and he kills anyone who proves to be a nuisance, why wouldn’t he just let us go soaring down to the ground and die?”

“Because he’s the most afraid,” Judas says. “He gets to play ruler over this floating rock and nobody challenges him. But if transport between Internment and the ground were easy, his ways would be challenged. He might be overthrown. You’re only proving that point. You already want him dead, and you’re just one person; imagine if everyone knew what he was doing. There’d be a riot.”

“There shouldn’t be a riot,” I say. “He should die quietly, and in pain. He should have someone he’s wronged standing in the doorway, watching to be sure he’s dead. That person should be the last thing he sees.”

“You know that his death will only mean the prince is crowned the next day,” Judas says. “I don’t believe he’ll be any better.”

“Then I’ll murder the prince, too.”

Judas makes a sound that could be a snicker, but by the time I hold the lantern to his face, his smirk is gone.

We reach the top of the tunnel and Judas goes about tying the ropes to keep the rickety crate in place. “You know I’d be a horrible person if I let you go through with this,” he says. “Not to mention it’ll be my head when everyone realizes you’re gone.”

“How do I open this?” I fumble with the wooden door overhead. Judas undoes a series of elaborate and rusty latches. With a hard shove, he throws the door up into the blackness and I’m hit with the smell of ash and something else I can’t quite place.