Perfect Ruin (18 page)

“After you,” he says cordially, taking the lantern from my fist.

There’s a small ladder leading up to the opening, wobbly and rustier than the latches were. Flecks of copper dirt crumble under my feet. I’m still wearing my uniform, right down to the polished black shoes.

“Careful not to slip on the mold,” Judas says, climbing up behind me. “All the moisture underground makes for unpleasantness. A lot of people think our lakes are replenished by the sky god, but spend some time underground and you’ll come to favor the theory that we absorb water from the clouds.”

Absorbing water from the clouds would make more sense than believing our lakes are a gift from the sky god. But when presented with the evidence, I see how much more terrifying it is to think we’re on our own.

I cough on the ashes and crawl onto the gritty ground. I’m back on the surface of Internment, but I don’t know where. I can’t see a thing because Judas has blown out the lantern.

“What’d you do that for?” I say.

“We can’t let anyone know we’re here,” Judas says. “It’ll look suspicious, a light escaping through the cracks.”

I’m about to ask where we are, but then I can identify that other smell beneath all the ashes. It used to fill my brother’s apartment whenever Alice was in the room. Flowers.

“We’re in the flower shop,” I gasp.

“Or what used to be the flower shop,” Judas says. “The king didn’t know exactly what we were up to, thankfully. But he knew we met here. He had the place burned down as a message to us, I’m sure.”

Amy’s face when I chased her down the street and she saw the fire takes on a whole new meaning now.

The train speeds by, and as the ground rumbles, I drop to my knees, fingertips dusting wilted petals and stems.

“This is home,” I say to them.

“Look. Morgan.” There’s a rustling noise as Judas crouches beside me. “I don’t know you very well, but based on our previous exchanges, you seem pretty … not stupid.”

“I know I can’t kill the king,” I finally admit. “Thank you for letting me have the illusion as long as you did.”

“No assassinations,” he says. “And you know that you can’t return home. So, short of that, what are you really after?”

“A message,” I say.

“A message?”

“For Pen. Just to let her know that I’m okay. I could write something in our cavern with a rock; it could be as cryptic as it needs to be—she’ll know I was there.”

Judas hesitates. “It’s dangerous.”

“She would do it for me,” I say. “She’d never leave without a good-bye. And don’t tell me it isn’t possible to sneak out there. You’ve had patrolmen looking for you for a long time and you’ve snuck around plenty.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t possible,” he says. “But it’s not safe.”

“Lead the way,” I say. “If I get caught, leave me behind.”

“You don’t believe I’ll leave you behind,” he says.

“Don’t tell me what I believe,” I say, standing. “You have no idea.”

I think I hear a laugh on his breath as he moves past me.

“We can’t use the front door,” he says. “But there’s a board that we can pry away from this window. It’s brittle, so be careful not to break it. We have to put it back exactly.”

He pries the board away from the window frame, and there’s the light of the half-moon spilling into the alleyway. “After you,” he says, whispering now. “But be quiet about it. I don’t know where the patrolmen are.”

We aren’t very far from my apartment, and I know this section very well, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling different now. I suppose I was hoping that I could get to the surface and it would all be like before. If I were to leave the alleyway and look to the right, I’d see the lights from my building and force myself not to think of my parents.

I would be a minute’s walking distance from the train that would take me there.

But I don’t look for my building. I make no movement toward the train. I watch Judas climb out beside me and secure the board back in place. He turns to me, a finger over his lips, then cants his head in the direction of the shadows beyond the street lanterns.

I follow him. Our footsteps are more silent than I would have thought possible.

I try not to pay attention to the cobbles, or the smell of the grass, or the chill in the air that always leads me to think it must be dusting on the ground. But I can’t stop myself from thinking of how that frozen dust must look. Does it melt at the warm touch of human skin? The world must be so ethereal, all its cracked walkways and worn buildings covered by perfect white.

Judas moves expertly between the trees, and I do my best to follow in his footsteps. My brother said that some of the patrolmen were part of this secret plan to leave Internment, and now I wonder if the reason Judas hasn’t been caught is because there are patrolmen on his side.

“What do we call this?” I whisper.

“Call what?” Judas says.

“This—plan. To leave Internment. Is it treason?”

He doesn’t stop walking, all stealth, but he looks back. His lips are chapped and deep red when he smiles. “It’s a rebellion.”

I don’t understand why my heart leaps onto my tongue. It’s more than that mere word causing my skin to prickle, my cheeks to go warm. It’s the way he said it. It’s him, moving in the darkness, something pulling me to follow.

He stops walking and holds out his hand to keep me from taking another step. We’re in sight of the cavern now, and I can see a figure kneeling at its mouth, head in hands.

“There’s someone,” he whispers.

“Pen!”

He tries to keep me from going forward, but I push past him, and by the time she’s turned her head, Judas has disappeared into the shadows.

“Morgan? Morgan!” She runs and doesn’t stop until she’s crashed into me and I’m toppling backward. Her tears are smeared onto my face when her cheek brushes mine.

“Pen?” I say. She’s sobbing, gripping at the back of my shirt. “Breathe,” I say. “You’re scaring me.”

“You—” She chokes on a sob and draws back. “You’re scared? What a thing to say. You had me thinking you were dead.” She claps her hands against my cheeks, staring through the darkness, making sure it’s really me. Her eyes reach mine and she loses what little composure she mustered, and she pulls me to her chest.

I’ve never seen her this way. Wouldn’t have thought it possible.

“Don’t cry, silly girl,” I say. “I’m right here.”

I bring her to sit at the mouth of the cavern with me, and after many quivering breaths, she tells me what happened. With all the sorrow and the chaos after the university student’s death, the pharmacy was overflowing with orders for elixirs to calm the nerves. They were ill prepared for so much action, and some batches were improperly measured. At least a dozen deaths were reported from a tainted batch, my family among them. Lex, Alice, my parents—all of us.

So that’s what they’re telling everyone.

She smiles, wipes a tear from her cheek. “But you’re okay. It was a mistake. I should have known better than to listen to my mother; she has one foot in a fantasy novel at all times. What really happened? Did you have to go to the hospital to get looked at? Like when Carmilla Tilmaker swallowed a dead bramble fly in kinder year.”

What really happened?

Now it’s my turn to be somber. I am too exhausted to cry. Is that normal? To be orphaned and not grasp the magnitude of such a word, let alone expend any emotion over it? “I was ill, but I’m okay now. Lex and Alice are fine.”

She plays with a lock of my hair, waiting for me to go on.

“Pen?” I stare at her knees and mine. “What if there were a way off this city, and I told you I was going to take it? Would you file to have me declared irrational?”

She doesn’t answer. There’s no way she could already know about the mechanical bird or the conspiracy or any of those things, but she knows me. She knows that something is coming.

“I can’t stay here,” I say. “I wasn’t even supposed to come out, but I had to”—say good-bye—“see the stars again.” I can’t imagine they’ll be this pretty from the ground. On the ground, the history book says, the humans have infinite land to fill with buildings; and the scopes show us that they make their own lights, and the stars mean nothing to them. But up here, we see them, as clear as lightbugs that float in the air around our heads.

Pen and I raise our heads and look at each other. “Come out from where?” she asks.

I listen for some sign that Judas is still nearby, but though I know he’s watching me, he’s silent. It’s as though I can feel him willing me not to say another word about it.

And he needn’t worry. I won’t tell. But it isn’t to protect the metal bird or the rebellion. It’s because of what she said that night on the train platform. She told me I needed to stop thinking about the ground. She said that she didn’t want to know what was beyond Internment.

We aren’t the greatest things to exist. I can’t believe that. I won’t believe that.

This is her home. I can’t take it away from her. Instead, all I can do is stare at her—this lovely, lovely girl who might have been nobility in another time with that hair and those eyes. If I never see her again after this moment, I’ll have enough memories of her to carry for every day of the rest of my life. But no matter how vivid those memories, they will all end here, now, her eyes glimmering in the starlight, and the feel of the blade pressed to my hip.

I won’t even get to see her wedding, I realize. She’ll have so many years to float in the sky, and my days here are coming to an end.

“I have to leave now,” I say.

She says, “Where are you going?”

“To murder the king,” I say. I know it isn’t possible, but I just want to know how it feels to say the words out loud. They feel perfect. My blood swirls and swirls with delicious warmth at the fantasy of it. “I’m going to creep into the clock tower,” I say, “and climb every last stair until I get up to the king’s apartment. I’m going to sneak into his bedroom while he’s sleeping and cut open his throat. I think that’s how I’ll do it. I’d like that.”

Pen would laugh at the absurdity on a normal day, but she’s looking into my eyes.

“Morgan—” She grips my arm, stands, and tugs me into the shadow of heavy leaves as though to protect me from what I’ve said. “You can’t be blurting out things like that right now. It’s treason. What if someone hears?”

“Nobody is listening,” I say. “Nobody ever listens to us. We’re all milling around pretending that what we do is important, that
we’re
important, but the king will do away with anyone he’d like.”

There’s a bright moon tonight, split to pieces by branches. It’s an organ with veins and arteries. A non-beating heart. If there’s a god at all, he’s dead in his sky.

Pen holds my face in her hands. Her thumb brushes at my cheek over and over. “This isn’t like you at all,” she says. “What’s happened?”

I’ve said ugly things, but she doesn’t flinch.

“You asked what really happened,” I say. “My parents are dead.”

I stare at her collarbone that’s framed with lace, the hollow of her throat, her shoulders that rise with the weight of her next breath. We’re fragile things. Our bones show through our skin. What would any god want with us?

Some sound escapes her lips, but I can’t comprehend it. All I know for sure is that I have to leave. I can’t face her like this. “I’ve said too much,” I say, and take a step away. I’m just about to run, when she grabs my wrist. I struggle. For the first time in my life I struggle to get away from her, but she’s too strong for it. I pull with all I’ve got, and her shoes dig into the earth, her legs don’t even move. She’s rooted, hardly a grunt for her efforts.

All the fight goes out of me. She lets go only when she’s sure I won’t run.

“They’re dead,” I say, and sink into the dirt. She kneels beside me.

When her mother became addicted to tonic, Pen was the victim of too many well wishes and sympathies. She has told me before that she’s had her fill of them for a lifetime no matter the tragedy, and that holds true. She says nothing.

“I can’t tell you the rest,” I say. “I would if the whole story belonged to me, but it isn’t all mine to tell. That’s the only part that matters to me, anyway. They’re dead, and I can’t stay. This all sounds so incredible that I wouldn’t expect you to believe it.”

“I believe you,” she says.

Of course she does. She’s out of her mind, the only girl left in the academy who’d still want to have anything to do with me. We’re the same sort. We always have been.

As I’m rising to a stand, there’s a stab of pain in the side of my neck, and I can’t move a muscle. The dart that’s just hit Pen’s shoulder is the only explanation. We’ve just been attacked. Something moves in the trees, and I’m falling back into someone’s waiting arms.

Y
OU’RE A LOUSY SHOT,” THE GIRL HUFFS. “You almost completely missed her neck. Papa would have never let you hear the end of that.”

“I am doing our father a favor, might I remind you,” the boy says, grunting as he hoists Pen over his shoulder. “We’ve just done more work in five seconds than his incompetent staff has done since that girl’s murder. Honestly. Letting fugitives run about this city like it’s a giant floating tea party.”

“I’ve always loved your analogies, Brother,” the girl says as she drags me from under the arms. I recognize her long hair, half of it braided around her head like a crown. The girls in my class have all tried to imitate that braid, with little success. It can be worn this perfectly by only one girl—the king’s only daughter, Princess Celeste.

The boy holding Pen can only be Prince Azure, then. Not that I can move to look at him. With some effort I’m just able to blink.

“He’d thank us if he knew,” the prince says.

The princess smells like cinnamon and something else, something I’d find pleasant if it were wafting out of a teahouse or spilling from one of the many bottles on Alice’s dresser. Now it just nauseates me.

Blackness is clouding my vision, and I fight it. I’ve already been poisoned once; I refuse to succumb so easily again.

I cling to the words the prince and princess are saying. They provide no answers, but they’re keeping me conscious.

“Mine is heavy,” he complains.

“Weakling,” she says. “It’ll be a wonder to me when you inherit this city.”

“I don’t see you carrying yours over your shoulder,” he says.

“About that, you should be more careful,” the princess says. “Maybe she’s our prisoner, but that’s no reason to destroy such a lovely dress.”

Despite the circumstances, all the girls of Internment would hate Pen if they knew that her dress had caught the attention of the princess. It was among the many presents from Pen’s mother. “Compensation for inebriation,” Pen calls them.

“I don’t know why we need both of them, anyway,” the prince says. “The patrolman’s daughter is the one we need.”

“Can’t leave witnesses,” the princess says. “So I’ll thank you to quit moaning about it.”

Can’t leave witnesses. I hope they’ve overlooked Judas, but there’s no indication that he’s nearby. With horror I wonder if he returned to the flower shop to give Pen and me a chance to say our good-byes. He might have no idea what just happened.

My heart should be pounding—I’m frightened enough—but my body won’t work. Perhaps the dart was meant to render me unconscious and I’m fighting it somehow. Or perhaps they want me to have my awareness when they torture me.

I have plenty of time to worry and speculate. The prince and princess trudge through the woods for what feels like forever, arguing the whole way.

“Would you be quiet now?” the princess says. There’s a heavy thud, and then the prince is flinging me into a wagon beside Pen. Just as he’s about to cover us with a large cloth, he stoops forward and brings his face close to mine. His breath is cinnamon, too. His eyes are clear, reflecting two perfect little skies full of stars.

“I think your dart killed her,” he says. “Her eyes are open.”

I will myself not to blink.

The princess brings herself close, her white rabbit fur cuffs sweeping across my forehead as she clears the hair from my face. Only the king’s family wears white fur, because they spend most all their time indoors, and it’s supposed to symbolize their purity of spirit. The rest of us would never be able to keep it clean.

The princess’s hand hovers over my mouth for a few seconds. “No, she’s definitely breathing.”

“It’s creepy,” the prince says. “It’s like she’s staring at me.”

I feel the fur cuff against my face again as the princess brushes my eyelids closed. “There. Happy?”

“Yes. Lovely.”

There’s darkness, the weight of the cloth covering me completely.

We’re taken a bit farther, and then a voice says, “Your mother has asked that you not hunt in your best clothes.”

“We’re sorry,” the prince says. “We’ve caught a deer this time, though. We’ll send it to the food factory once Celeste has sawed the antlers for her jewelry collection.”

Meat is a rare delicacy, mostly reserved for the festival of stars, and hunting is restricted to those who work in the food factories, but apparently those rules don’t apply to the king’s family.

There are the sounds of doors closing. I can feel Pen’s limp body jostling against mine as the wagon is steered through a series of turns, and then I think we’re being hoisted down a flight of stairs. I try to open my eyes, but my eyelids are heavy. The prince and princess are whispering now, and their words are lost to the throb of blood in my ears. I’m still fighting for consciousness when the wagon goes still. There’s the smell much like the one underground when Judas led me outside from the metal bird.

“Do you think it would be too mean of me to steal that dress?” the princess says. “It’s so lovely.”

“You’re ridiculous,” the prince says. “You can’t leave her naked.”

“You should be thanking me for the opportunity,” she says.

He says something in return, but it’s as though they’re talking underwater. The words make no sense. The blackness takes over.

It’s the chime that wakes me, so close that the sound is caught between my teeth. Internment feels as though it’s shaking.

Another chime. Another.

“It’s three o’clock,” Pen says.

I open my eyes to the light of a single candle flickering in a sconce on the stone wall. Pen is slumped under it, arms behind her back, staring where the light doesn’t reach.

“We’re in the clock tower,” she adds. “In case you haven’t guessed.”

She doesn’t sound angry or frightened, just exhausted.

I realize my hands are tied behind my back with twine, but I manage to push myself up against the wall.

“Can you reach against my hip?” I say. “There’s a knife. I don’t know if it’ll be enough to cut through the twine, but it’s something.”

“Oh, good,” Pen says, attempting to reach it. “If Princess Whatsit unbuttons a single button of this dress, I’ll cut her face.”

“You heard them talking as they dragged us in here, too?” I ask.

“Yes, but I couldn’t move.” She manages to dislodge the knife from my waistband. There’s a clatter as it hits the floor when it falls from the cloth. “Hold still.”

“I’m sorry about all this,” I say.

“We’re both having a bad night,” she says. “And now the king’s freak children are probably going to try to murder us and hang our heads on their walls. What else could we expect from a girl who collects deer antlers?”

I think of Basil, warm and asleep in the metal bird. It seems an act of insanity that I left him. I’d give anything to crawl back under that blanket.

Footsteps echo somewhere in the blackness. Pen drops the knife, and she isn’t able to hide it before there’s the creaking of a door.

“I knew we should have checked for weapons,” the princess whispers angrily. “See that? They’ve got a knife.”

“How was I supposed to know schoolgirls walk around with hidden knives?” the prince says.

“No matter,” the princess says, swishing her hair behind her shoulders. She strides over to us, stomps her glittering white slipper onto the knife, and slides the knife toward her. “I’ll be keeping this,” she says to us. “Can’t have you trying to kill us.”

“You wouldn’t have to worry,” Pen snaps, “if you hadn’t kidnapped us and tied us up like wild animals.”

“You aren’t fooling me,” the princess says, walking backward toward her brother. She gestures to me with the knife. “You threatened to kill our father.”

“We heard you,” the prince says. “You said you’d cut his throat.”

They’re both nodding importantly.

“Your father killed my parents,” I say, unaware until I’ve spoken them that I have the bravery for words. I always thought that if I ever spoke to the famous duo, I’d be nervous. They seemed so unattainable on the broadcasts and in their images. But up close, they’re only people. Dressed in frilly pajamas with lace at the cuffs and collars, but people nonetheless. I can’t remember why I thought there was anything to fuss over.

“Your family committed treason,” the prince says.

“How would you know?” I say. “How would you know anything that happens on Internment? You never come down from your clock tower. Do you know what treason even is?”

“Of course they don’t,” Pen says, trying to soothe me. “They’re idiotic, Morgan; you can’t expect them to understand what they’ve done.”

“Fancy words,” the princess says, “considering we’ve got weapons and you’ve got your hands behind your backs. We were going to bring you something to eat, but forget it now.”

“Just kill us if that’s what you’re going to do,” Pen says.

The princess seems to be considering it. But she lowers the knife and smoothes her nightgown against her hips. “We’re still deciding whether or not to tell our father we’ve captured you, Morgan Stockhour. He’s got patrolmen out looking for you, you know, and they’ve been ordered to bring you to him. Alive or dead.” She sings those last three words, twirling her long hair around the knife.

“And it never occurred to you that that’s insane?” Pen says. “The king giving orders to kill a harmless girl your own age? Killing her family and then chasing after her—that’s good leadership to you?”

The princess is looking at my eyes, and maybe Pen’s words have reached her, but then she blinks them away and covers her mouth with her hair as she murmurs something to her brother. He stares at us. Despite his round face, there’s fierceness in his eyes that are framed by brows a shade too dark for his hair.

It’s too much, that stare. I feel everything crashing down, as though Internment has fallen from the sky and broken into pieces on top of me.

I’ll never see my parents again. I’ll never go home again. Instead I’m staring at the eyes of this heartless boy. He is a symbol of the city that has betrayed me.

Pen sees the change in me. She brings her mouth close to my ear. “Don’t do it,” she whispers. “Don’t you cry in front of them. Dig your nails into your palm. Hold your breath.”

I do what she says, and it helps.

The prince covers his mouth and says something to his sister. I focus on the pain in my palms.

“We’ve decided to let you live,” the princess says. “For now. If we killed you tonight, it would be an awful lot of blood; we’d be up until dawn with the cleaning, and we have lessons in the morning.”

“But we aren’t going to untie you,” the prince says. “It’s in your interest to be quiet.”

“You don’t want someone else to find you,” the princess says.

“They won’t be as generous as us,” the prince says.

It makes my mind spin, the way they together seem to be speaking one long sentence.

They back into the darkness until I can’t see them, and then there’s the sound of a door closing and latches being latched.

I unclench my fists.

“You were very brave,” Pen says, allowing me to drop my head in her lap. I’m free at last to cry, but the tears won’t come.

“What a mess I’ve made of things,” I say. “For both of us.”

“I’ve spent the entire day thinking you were dead,” she says. “If the price of having you alive is being locked in the clock tower, I cheerfully accept. I didn’t have anything better to do with my night.”

And despite that, I can smell no trace of tonic. She endured the news of my supposed death while sober. I’m proud of her for that.

“Maybe they’ll let you go when they realize you have nothing to do with all of this,” I say.

“You don’t have anything to do with this either,” Pen says. “They’re warped. You don’t deserve this any more than I do.”

I close my eyes.

“Was that true?” she asks. “What you said about the king killing your parents?”

“He had a hand in it,” I say. “My parents and Lex—they knew things they weren’t supposed to know. They were planning something he didn’t like.”

“Whatever it was, it can’t have been worth murdering them over,” Pen says.

Struggling without the use of my hands, I sit up and look at her. “They were planning to leave Internment. I don’t mean jumping over the edge, but actually flying away properly.”

She stares at me, trying to decide what to make of this, and then she laughs with uncertainty. “And the king believed them? Lots of people fantasize about that.”

“They built a machine,” I say. “It’s hidden where the king can’t find it, so he’s tried to stop the plans they laid out. Those deaths today weren’t because of tainted pharmaceuticals.”

I wasn’t going to tell her all of this, but now that she’s trapped here with me, she deserves to know what for.

“It’s like Micah and the boat of stars,” she says, speaking of a chapter in
The History of Internment
. “When he saw a constellation in the shape of a boat, he thought the sky god was speaking to him, so he built one just like it.”

Pen knows all of the chapters. She can make them a parable for any situation, she’s so adamant about her faith.

“You remember how that story ended,” she says.

I do. Micah took his boat to the edge of Internment, and when he tried to sail into the sky, the boat splintered apart, impaling him. He became the first jumper. “I don’t think this is like that,” I say.

“Nobody can leave,” Pen says. “The sky god won’t allow it. The king knows that. I don’t understand why he would kill anyone for trying when they’ll only see for themselves.”

“Maybe that’s wrong,” I say. “Maybe there is a way off Internment, and we’re right on the verge of discovering it, and it frightens him.”

She looks sympathetic. “I know how much you want to believe that, especially now, but—”