Perfect Ruin (23 page)

There’s nothing I can say to make this better. I’m not surprised that she’s letting it show how much she cares for him, after a lifetime of hiding it; there’s something about imminent death that makes all the threads weave into a picture like one of my mother’s samplers.

“But we must be brave, remember?” I say.

She nods, watching her tears fall onto her betrothal band.

The next violent jolt has Basil at my side. He surprises me by putting an arm around Pen as well as me. He’s never been very familiar with her, but now we have our fear in common. We are all part of this floating city we’ll never see again. This city I love so much that I fear I’ll cease to exist once I’m off it.

I steady the lantern between my feet to keep it from sliding. We stay huddled together as the bird struggles to burrow the rest of the way to the sky. We count the seconds until our little world is lost to us for good.

“Have any visions about this?” Judas asks Amy over the incessant noise of the levers and the bird struggling its way through the last of the dirt.

“A dream,” Amy says. “And you don’t want to know.”

“Don’t take stock in that,” I whisper to Pen, whose sobs have lost their sound. I do wish she’d be calm. I can’t bear to see her in such pain. I would hijack the helm and claw this bird up to the surface to take her home if I could.

“It would be unwise to remain standing,” the professor says. Obligingly, we huddle on the floor.

A pace away, Alice is holding Lex’s hands. He’s saying something into her ear while she stares worriedly at the windows. Poor Alice, still wearing a pretty dress, though its underarms and chest are darkened with sweat. Bone and bead earrings still hang from her ears. Dragged into this. All she wanted was a life with my brother. To go out sometimes. To have a child. To grow flowers in the apartment without Lex blindly clomping into them. To grow old in dodder housing, having lived a complete life. Instead she’s being forced out of her home.

Now isn’t the time to be angry with my brother, but I suppose the anger I feel for him never goes away. I cover it with love and with patience, but it doesn’t undo what he’s taken from all of us.

I’m angry with my parents, too. For not telling me. For dying.

“Breathe,” Basil says, and I realize I’ve begun to hyperventilate.

“Tell me again what you said earlier,” he says. “About the sleeping machine.”

“Sleeping?” Pen whispers.

“I said that we’re all inside this sleeping machine, and we’re waiting to see where it takes us when it wakes.”

“Good,” Basil says. “You believed it, then. All you have to do is hold on to that belief a little longer. And then we’ll be in the sky.”

“There aren’t maps of the sky,” Pen says. “We’re flying right off the page.” She looks as though she’ll be sick. But if she’s going to say anything more, she doesn’t get her chance. The bird tilts to one side and we all go sliding toward the wall. The lanterns go wild from the spill, and all but one are extinguished.

I bite down on a mouthful of my shirt and scream into it. The professor’s cursing does nothing to console.

“Keep that damned thing lit,” he tells Judas, who holds the dying lantern. “It’s all we’ve got.”

But he’s wrong about that. In an instant all of the windows fill up with brightness.

I
SEE NO BLUE SKY, AND NO CLOUDS. The brightness churns in a way not unlike the swallows.

There’s a terrible grating sound, which I come to realize is the side of the bird scraping against the bottom of the city. The howling can only be the wind.

The turbulence undoes a piece of metal in the ceiling, and it comes crashing to the floor with the spattering of bolts. Lex calls out for me.

“I’m okay,” I say. I try to crawl toward him, but Basil tightens his hold on me.

“Keep your head down,” he tells me.

But that’s impossible with the temptations these windows hold; I keep trying to make out shapes in the brightness.

“Is the bird strong enough to make it?” Judas asks, clinging to the professor’s chair, which is bolted in place.

“This design is superior to the earlier models,” the professor says.

“Earlier models?” I say. “You mean—you mean this isn’t the first time this has been attempted?”

“Of course not! There have been half a dozen tries,” the professor says, shouting to be heard over the wind. “People have been attempting this for generations.”

I don’t want to ask what came of those attempts. The answer is obvious anyway. The birds were destroyed, probably sent hurtling through the sky if they weren’t ripped apart by this wind. This is the wind that throws jumpers back. Escape is impossible from the surface; why should it be any more feasible from the bottom?

Then the tumultuous bird calms. And I see what no other resident of Internment has ever seen: the bottom of the city.

It’s jagged. From the outside I can now see a dome of wind that encapsulates the city, forcing clouds around and over and under it.

The bird trembles, and through the windows of the helm I can see the wings burst open, and we break into a smooth glide.

The professor punches down on a large brass button and there’s a sharp chemical smell. Judas told me the professor had been brewing his own fuel to keep us in the air. There was no promise it would work. We could be crashing to the ground right now, but we aren’t. The weight leaves my chest.

I’m too stunned to move. Beside me, Pen’s sobs have ceased. There is nothing but the howl of air and the creaking of the gears and the popping of the metal.

“What’s happening now?” Lex says, unaffected by the view. This snaps Alice out of her trance and she grabs his hands, brings them to her face.

We are sinking into the sky. Our tiny city is getting smaller. Something within me is sinking, too.

I wrap my arms around Basil because for the first time since all of this began, he looks truly pained. His parents and his brother are out of reach now. He could blame me, if he wants. I would understand. But no such words come from him now. He’s choosing me; no regrets.

“It’s just like the maps have come alive,” Pen says, streaks of tears still on her face.

Amy is the first among us who’s brave enough to stand. Basil is next, taking my hand and guiding me up from my shaky knees.

The head of the bird is a sphere of windows. Light comes in from above and all around.

Judas still clings to the lantern, and the look in his eyes is further away than Internment as it gets smaller behind us. He watches our city get left behind. A city that turned its back on him, took away the girl he loved.

Pen slowly rises, holding on to my shirt hem like this is her first step.

All my skin is covered in tiny bumps, and my blood has gone cold. The whirling clouds conceal Internment almost entirely. I can see the city for a moment at a time, but mostly it’s a white sphere. From the ground I suppose it wouldn’t seem much like a city at all. All they would see is the dirt that holds our city together. Maybe the people of the ground haven’t attempted to reach us because they don’t think such a place could be inhabited.

We’ve all gone silent. The levers groan to a stop, no longer causing the claws to move as though digging through the dirt.

Judas is first to snap out of our collective trance. He crouches in front of Amy and says, “Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Really?”

There’s a little laugh to her voice. “I promise. Just enjoy the view.”

But a crash somewhere on the lower levels interrupts us. We look at one another, everyone in the bird accounted for.

“Oh, the bloody—” the professor says. “Don’t tell me another chunk of the ceiling has come off.”

The noise repeats itself, a loud thump like someone kicking a wall. A voice cries out for help, and at first I’m sure I’ve imagined it, but Judas reacts, moving toward the ladder.

“Everyone stay here,” he says, but I follow him anyway, with Pen, Basil, and Amy at my heels.

“Don’t,” Alice calls out, but she doesn’t come after me. She won’t leave Lex.

We descend the ladder, and the daylight no longer reaches us. Judas uses the flame of his lantern to light another that used to hang from the ceiling.

The kicking noise persists, and a scream, not of fear but seemingly of frustration.

Pen and I look at each other.

“That sounds like—”

I shake my head. “It can’t be.”

Judas tugs at the heavy door of a storage closet where spare clothes are kept. And, of all things, Princess Celeste is perched on the floor, having been prepared to kick at the door again.

As if that weren’t strange enough, someone is slumped behind her in the darkness. I feel relieved to think that the prince survived Pen’s attack, but when Judas holds up the lantern, I see that the ruffled blond hair and sleeping face don’t belong to Prince Azure.

“Thomas,” Pen gasps.

He doesn’t move, and Pen balls her hands into fists. “What have you done to him, you bloody lunatic?” she cries. I hook my arm around her waist to keep her from lunging.

“Yes, right,” the princess says. “I thought that might be your reaction.” She reaches into the collar of her dress and extracts something that’s wrapped in a cloth. Even before she has unwrapped it, I know it’s the knife I was carrying when she and her brother kidnapped me. She pulls Thomas’s limp body under her arm and holds the knife to his jugular. I can see the blue vein in his throat dangerously close to that blade. The bird is already so rocky, she might kill him even if she means only to bluff.

Preemptively, I clasp my hand over Pen’s mouth. She screams in protest, but Thomas can’t afford any chances. The princess clearly hates Pen after what she did, and Pen is already so distraught from the journey that she could say something she’ll immediately regret.

“I thought you might try to kick me out, even after we took to the sky,” the princess says. Her eyes are on Pen. “I planned to use the boy as leverage, but I believe I could return the favor and kill someone
you
love.”

Pen bites my hand, hard, but I don’t let go.

“What is it you want from us?” Judas says.

“Shouldn’t it be obvious?” the princess says. “I want you to take me to the ground.”

“Well, good news, then, because we couldn’t let you out even if we wanted to,” Judas says. “Opening a door right now would get us all killed at this altitude.”

I pity her. She’s known for her poise, and here she is, undone. Her braided crown is frayed. Her eyes are desperate and vicious. She’s the most popular girl on Internment, but she’ll find little kindness among the lot of us. She looks at me. “Is that true?”

Is it? I have no idea. “Yes,” I say. “Of course. Everyone knows that.”

Princess Celeste has a steady hand on that knife, but the unpredictability of flight makes me nervous.

Pen stops squirming and she has her eyes on her betrothed. His chest rises and drops. His breaths disturb the lace of the princess’s collar just so.

“You,” the princess says. “Patrolman’s daughter.” She pats the small bit of space beside her on the closet floor. “Let’s have a chat, shall we?”

I let go of Pen. “Don’t be stupid,” I whisper, and kiss her cheek. She’s growling.

“Bring the lantern,” the princess says. “It gets dark in here.”

As soon as I’m beside her, she reaches forward and pulls the closet door shut.

She releases Thomas, letting him spill backward into a pile of once neatly folded clothes. I notice that she keeps hold of the knife.

“Don’t blame him for what Pen and I did,” I say. “He didn’t know anything about all of this.”

“Didn’t he?” she says. “He knew where to find you. I followed him all the way to the flower shop.”

I don’t know how Thomas knew to go to the flower shop, unless he’d somehow seen me leaving it with Judas, or had been nearby when Pen and I had been kidnapped.

“I wasn’t planning to hurt him,” she says. “I just needed some kind of backup plan in case you tried to toss me out. And he
did
seem to already be heading this way.”

“How did you sneak into the bird without anyone catching you?” I say.

“I had to hide in the dark for a long time. But then, before you started moving, everyone stepped out into the dirt to”—she clears her throat—“use the water room behind this thing. I presume there isn’t one on board.” She smirks, clearly impressed with herself. “Anyway, the door was left open. My brother and I have been sneaking out of the tower since we were toddlers, practically.”

“I suppose you can’t be the child of the king without being brilliant,” I say, trying to keep the conversation going. It seems to keep her from doing anything rash.

“No, my brother is stupid quite most of the time,” she says, not without fondness.

“‘Is’?” I ask. Not “was.”

She looks at the darkness beyond the lantern, crestfallen. “He’s breathing, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Will he live?” I ask.

“Never mind that,” she says, and attempts to pat down her frizzed hair. “He isn’t here, and we are, aren’t we? And I need your help. Call me daft, but I like you. You were at least honest with me about this thing existing.”

I wonder if she remembers that she kidnapped me, and that her father is the reason Lex and I no longer have our parents. They should be on this bird, not her.

I swallow my anger. For Thomas. For Pen. For sanity’s sake.

“As you can understand, I don’t feel very safe here,” the princess says. “Especially with that Hensley boy. If he’d murder his betrothed, I can imagine what he’d do to me.”

Judas did not murder Daphne. I’m so tired of hearing the accusation that I could scream. But it isn’t the worst thing for Princess Celeste to fear him.

“And you want me to protect you,” I say.

“I don’t require your protection,” she says. “I require your sensibility. When your beastly friend raised that stone to my brother, you tried to stop her. You saw that it was a bad idea. You don’t act irrationally even if you’re angry, do you?”

It was my irrational need to leave the bird that got me kidnapped in the first place, but I don’t say that. “I have been called a diplomat.”

She sighs. “Being the king’s daughter doesn’t mean much now that we’re no longer on Internment,” she says. “But I will kill this boy if anyone tries to harm me. He’ll wake up soon, but that won’t stop me. And don’t let anyone get ideas about leaving me on the ground, either. I’m to return safely to the sky, or, believe me, my father will make you wish you hadn’t returned. I’ve left him a note explaining where I’ve gone.”

She doesn’t know that this is a one-way trip. Not even the king will be able to retrieve her. It would give me too much pleasure to tell her. But this would be unwise; she’s scared, scorned, likely hasn’t slept, and she’s holding a knife. And the fact that she snuck onto this bird tells me that she must have a compelling reason. Something worth risking as much as she has, leaving her home and surrounding herself with people who might cause her harm.

“I know Pen, and she won’t care how sensible I am. Not if I’m defending a girl holding her betrothed hostage. You have to let Thomas go. If you do that, I’m confident I can keep her from strangling you.”

“And the Hensley boy?”

“I’d just avoid him if I were you,” I say. “He’s not a fan of your family’s.”

The princess stares at me for a few seconds. “And you?” she says.

“I’m not a fan of your family’s, either,” I say. “All you know about me, for sure, is that when Pen attacked your brother, I tried to stop her. It may not be a lot to go by, but there it is.”

She considers this.

Then, without saying anything, she grabs Thomas under the shoulders and hoists the dead weight of him into my lap.

It is a peace offering. She nods.

I kick at the door, and I hear the sound of listening ears backing away. “You can let us out now,” I say.

Pen dabs at Thomas’s face with a wet cloth. She presses it to either side of his neck, under his chin.

It’s just the three of us in the bunk room. The others are trying to make themselves useful in the Nucleus. Judas is keeping watch over Princess Celeste away from the others; with all the grace of her lineage, she allowed herself to be searched. She allowed me to remove my knife from her hand, and the tranquilizer darts from her belt and from the rims of her stockings, while Judas and Basil awkwardly averted their eyes.

“He seems unharmed,” I offer now by way of comfort.

Pen undoes the top buttons of his shirt, and she peels back the collar until she can see the bruise on the side of his neck. “It’s one of her stupid tranquilizers. He can probably hear everything we’re saying right now,” Pen says. “Thomas, you idiot.” She kisses his parted lips. “Why did you follow me?”

I can’t rid the smile from my face before she notices.

“What?”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen you act so fond of him before,” I say.

“Of course not,” she says. “He’s repulsive.” She brushes away some drool at the corner of his mouth with her thumb. “But he belongs to me.”

They’re still betrothed. Willingly, it would seem. Maybe the ground won’t change us at all.

I stand.

“Where are you going?” Pen says.

“To find Basil.”

I hurry down the hall, up the ladder, and nearly bump into Basil in the doorway to the Nucleus. He’s carrying the pieces that fell from the ceiling as we broke free of the city. “Careful,” he says. “You could cut yourself.”